“Stolen Honda used in attack on US vehicle”

 

The bomb which targeted a US Embassy vehicle passing through Karantina Tuesday was placed in an olive green, 1980-model Honda Civic, which a security source said had been reported stolen by the owner five years ago. Twenty kilograms of explosive were believed used in the bombing. The vehicle was identified from the serial number on the engine, which was found several meters from the blast zone.

 

The victims of the bombing were identified as Lebanese Joseph Khalil Khoury, a Sin al-Fil resident and owner of the Fiat car that took the brunt of the blast, his passenger Fouad Kamal al-Abbas from Tripoli, and Ghassan Hussein al-Mohammad, a bystander of Syrian nationality. Families of the victims were at Jeittawy Hospital Wednesday to identify the bodies. Mathew Clason, a US citizen from the state of Minnesota, was wounded in the blast. He was at the nearby National Evangelical Church, where he teaches, when the bomb went off.

 

“The windows blew in and I fell down, I was knocked out,” Clason told The Associated Press at the hospital emergency room. His head and right leg were bandaged.

 

Karantina resident De Gaulle Korsetty, whose third-floor apartment overlooks the abandoned Bacal battery factory next to which the bomb-laden Honda was parked, had seen the car before the blast and had became suspicious.

 

“I was on the balcony and had just come inside and closed the door behind me when the bomb went off,” Korsetty told The Daily Star. “When I was on the balcony I saw the vehicle, it was a Honda coupe, olive green. I was suspicious of the car because it was parked nose to the wall, between a dumpster and a parked truck, with its rear end jutting out into the street.”

 

Korsetty”s apartment was a scene of utter devastation, doors reduced to kindling, windows shattered and wood paneling torn off the walls. “Fortunately traffic was light and it was not yet 5 p.m. when the bomb went off.

 

That”s when employees of the nearby Sleep Comfort factory leave work,” Korsetty said. The blast occurred a little after 4:30 p.m.

 

Korsetty was struck on his left side by a piece of flying shrapnel, a mangled piece of metal the size of a human palm. “We thought it was an air raid, we thought Israel had dropped a bomb or something,” he said.

 

A senior security source said that judging from the damage caused and the blast radius, the explosive charge weighed around 20 kilograms. The strength of the blast left a gaping hole in the side of the Bacal factory, where the charred remnants of the Honda were found.
 

“Investigators took tapes from security cameras in the area to see if they captured images of the booby-trappedvehicle,” a security source told The Daily Star, adding that the analysis of the tapes could take from 24 to 48 hours. State Prosecutor Saeed Mirza, who took personal charge of the investigation, chaired a joint Lebanese-US security meeting Wednesday afternoon. The meeting included members of the FBI and the US diplomatic security service and discussed joint cooperation and exchange of expertise.

 

George Layouss, a 35-year veteran worker at the Sleep Comfort factory, was about to get into his car and drive home when the bomb went off. “I am used to this, I lived through the [1975-90] Civil War. I knew immediately what to do, I ducked under the car and covered my head,” Layouss said.

The day after the blast residents and business owners returned to survey the damage. The predominantly industrial area was shaken by the blast, which brought memories of the Civil War flooding back.

 

“I wished so many times my factory was not here but in some other country,” said Farid Kamel, general manager of Kameltan, a tannery established by his father in 1968, which overlooks the site of the attack.

 

Amid the shattered glass windows of his tannery, Kamel was beginning to clear the broken glass in hopes of restarting production. “When I heard the blast I though we were being bombed, that Israel was targeting our factory,” Kamel told The Daily Star, estimating damage at his plant to be around $35,000. “When I came out of the building it was like Baghdad, just like the scenes we see on the news from Iraq,” he added. Four workers at his factory suffered minor injuries from flying glass.

 

“My father suffered through war and devastation and was forced to close down the factory in 1975, then in 1993 we reopened and resumed work. Now we are going back to the same situation. It”s been 30 years of wars and destruction,” Kamel said, adding that its been all downhill for the country since the assassination of former Premier Rafik Hariri. “When Hariri was around he reinvigorated businesses and generated confidence in the country, unlike the politicians now,” he said.