1 killed, 6 wounded in Lebanese city clashes

PanARMENIAN.Net - One person was shot dead and six people were wounded in clashes on Saturday in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli between neighborhoods which support rival sides in Syria's war, according to Reuters.

Security sources said the dead man was from the Sunni Muslim Bab al-Tabbaneh district of Tripoli, whose residents overwhelmingly support the Sunni Muslim rebels battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

He was killed in an exchange of fire with gunmen in the Alawite neighborhood of Jebel Mohsen, which supports the Alawite Syrian leader.

The divisions in Tripoli, 20 miles from the Syrian border, reflect the sectarian gulf across Lebanon over Syria's civil war. But the northern city, where tensions between the Sunni Muslim majority and small Alawite community have festered for decades, has seen some of the heaviest violence this year.

Two car bombs in August killed 42 people and wounded hundreds at Sunni mosques in Tripoli, just a week after a car bomb in a Shi'ite area of Beirut killed 27 people.

Clashes between fighters in Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jebel Mohsen have flared several times in recent months, killing dozens since the beginning of the year.

Saturday's fighting erupted despite the deployment of soldiers in both districts. It followed reports that Alawite men were shot and wounded in three separate incidents this week, and an attack on a bus in Tripoli in which several Alawite men were beaten.

In the Bekaa Valley, the Lebanese army said it defused three 107-millimetre Grad rockets on Friday near the northeastern town of al-Qaa near the Syrian border. It said the rockets were ready for launching when they were discovered.

Suspected supporters of the Syrian rebels have fired several rockets at Shi'ite targets in the area, saying they were in response to the intervention by Lebanon's Shi'ite Hezbollah militia in Syria's civil war. The conflict has also drawn in Sunni Muslim fighters from across the Middle East.