A prominent pro-Western politician and four other people were killed in a powerful car bomb which exploded through a business district in the center of the Lebanese capital on Friday, the Associated Press reported.
Driving through central Beirut, former finance minister and a senior aide to former Prime Minister Saad Hariri, Mohammed Chatah was targeted by the bomb, security officials said.
Chatah, 62, a Sunni Muslim, was also a critic of Lebanon's Shiite Hezbollah movement. His death occurred three weeks before the long-delayed opening of a trial of five Hezbollah suspects indicted for the February 2005 bombing which killed former Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, Saad's father, and 21 other people, the AP reported.
A tweet posted on his Twitter account less than an hour before the blast accused the Shiite movement of trying to take control of the country.
"Hezbollah is pressing hard to be granted similar powers in security and foreign policy matters that Syria exercised in Lebanon for 15 years," the tweet read.
Hariri heads the main, Western-backed coalition in Lebanon, which is engaged in bitter feuding with the militant Hezbollah group, which is allied to Syrian President Bashar Assad. Several recent bombings have targeted senior Hezbollah figures or districts where the Shiite group dominates, according to the AP.
Chatah and his driver were killed along with three other people, confirmed the National News Agency. According to the Health Ministry, more than 70 people were wounded. But no confirmation was made on whether the explosion was a result of a car bomb.
As tensions grow over Syria's civil war, the past months have seen a wave of bombings in Lebanon. After the Friday morning blast, the city saw thick black smoke billowing in the post downtown commercial district behind the government headquarters and above the seafront of the Lebanese capital.
People were moved away from the affected area by the army, where the twisted wreckage of several cars was still smoldering, the AP reported. Speaking on conditions of anonymity, security officials said the bomb exploded as Chatah was on his way to a meeting at Hariri's downtown residence.
The Syrian war has raised tensions in Lebanon's Sunni and Shiite communities as each side lines up in support of their brethren in the conflict next door, the AP reported.
Still recovering from its 15-year civil war that ended in 1990, Lebanon is on the brink of descending into full-blown sectarian violence. Former minister Marwan Hamadeh, who survived a car bombing in 2004, told Al Arabiya television, "Hezbollah will not be able to rule Lebanon, no matter how much destruction it causes or blood it spills."
Chatah, a prominent economist and former ambassador to the U.S., was one of the closest aides to former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, who was killed in a truck bombing in Beirut in 2005, not far from Friday's explosion.
He later became finance minister when Hariri's son, Saad, took over the premiership, and stayed on as his senior adviser after he lost the post in early 2011, the AP reported.
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