Pat Dollard | Young Americans

BEIRUT- A car bomb killed a police intelligence officer involved in the investigation of assassinations in Lebanon, in an attack in a Christian suburb of Beirut on Friday.

Police chief Brigadier-General Ashraf Rifi named the officer targeted in the blast while on his way to work as Captain Wisam Eid. A bodyguard and two other people were also killed.

Thirty-eight other people were wounded.

Eid, 31, worked for an intelligence unit widely viewed as close to anti-Syrian ruling coalition leader Saad al-Hariri and which was frequently criticized by the Syrian-backed opposition.

“Eid had a role in all the files linked to terrorist bombings,” Rifi told reporters at the scene.

The assassination was the latest in a wave of bombings and political killings in Lebanon over the past three years. The turmoil caused by the killings has fuelled the country’s worst political crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war.

The police intelligence unit has been closely involved in the U.N.-led investigation into the 2005 assassination of Hariri’s father, former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri, and in a crackdown on al Qaeda-inspired militants.

Interior Minister Hassan al-Sabaa said Eid, who was a communications engineer, had been targeted before. He took up his post after a roadside bomb wounded his predecessor, Samir Shehadeh, in 2006.

Security sources said Eid was responsible for tracking mobile telephone communications made by attackers in previous assassinations and of Islamist militant cells.

The car packed with at least 50 kg of explosives was parked on the side of a road near an overpass in the suburb of Hazmiyeh. It was detonated by remote control as Eid’s car drove by, security sources said.

(Reuters)