Tripoli, December 21: Unknown attackers raked a bus from Syria travelling in northern Lebanon with gunfire early Monday, killing one person and wounding several others, a security official said.
The bus, which was transporting 25 Syrian labourers, was travelling near an army checkpoint along the main highway between Syria and northern Lebanon when the incident took place at about 3:00 am (0100 GMT), the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said.
Three windows on the driver’s side were shattered by the bullets and the tyres also bore bullet holes.
The victim was identified as a 17-year-old labourer. Those injured were apparently struck by glass.
Thousands of Syrian labourers work in Lebanon, mainly in construction.
The army has secured the site of the attack located near open fields in Deir Ammar district about five kilometres (three miles) north of the city of Tripoli, the official said.
Ahmed Eid, the mayor of Deir Ammar, denounced the incident which comes a day after Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri ended a two-day fence-mending visit to Damascus.
It was Hariri’s first visit to Syria since the 2005 assassination of his father, ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri — a killing that he and his US-backed allies in Beirut blamed on Syria.
“This could be an isolated incident but there are some who will try to take political advantage from it,” Eid said.
Deir Ammar is located near the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared, which was the site of fierce battles in 2007 between the army and an Al-Qaeda-inspired group.
The fighting left 400 people dead, including 168 Lebanese soldiers.
The army since then has also been the target of two bomb attacks near Tripoli that left about a dozen people dead.
Syria was the main powerbroker in its tiny neighbour for nearly three decades until April 2005 when it pulled out its troops from Lebanon under international and regional pressure, two months after the assassination of Rafiq Hariri.
The two neighbours established diplomatic ties for the first time last year, with Syria opening an embassy in Beirut, while Lebanon opened its mission in Damascus in March.
The US- and Western-backed Hariri said at the weekend that his unity government, which includes members of the Syria- and Iran-backed Hezbollah coalition, wanted to take measures with Damascus to develop these ties.
“We want privileged, sincere and honest relations … in the interest of both countries and both peoples,” the 39-year-old premier told a news conference in Damascus at the end of the landmark two-day visit.
“We want to build ties with Syria based on positive points,” he added, describing his visit during which he had three rounds of private talks with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad as “historic”.
Assad is also “very attached to sincere relations based on common understanding” between the two countries and spoke “positively” of problems that still need to be resolved, Hariri said.
Foremost is a plan to demarcate the porous border between the two neighbours, he said.
—Agencies