Damascus - A car bomb in the Syrian capital Damascus early
Saturday killed at least 17 civilians and wounded 14 in an attack
believed to be aimed at intelligence personnel.
The 200-kilo bomb went off near the busy Sayyida Zainab
district at 8:45 am (0545 GMT). The bomb, which exploded near a
secret service facility, was believed to be targeting a senior
intelligence official who was in the building at the time, Lebanese
media reported.
There were no immediate reports whether this person was killed or
injured.
Witnesses in the area said some of the dead were intelligence men
in plain clothes. However, the Syrian authorities said all the
victims were civilians.
Anti-terrorism experts were immediately at the scene and closed
all roads to the area. Houses in the area were searched for suspects.
The roads were reopened later and normal movement resumed.
'This is a cowardly act,' Syrian Interior Minister Colonel Bassam
Abdel Majid told Syrian television.
The powerful blast was felt in other neighbourhoods with one
witness telling Syrian television it felt like an earthquake.
'The fact that Saturday was a holiday in Syria helped in reducing
the number of casualties in an area that is busy with pedestrians and
schools,' said another witness.
A famous Shiite shrine, the Sayyida Zainab mosque, is located in
the area and is frequented by pilgrims.
A Syrian source near the scene told Deutsche Presse-Agentur dpa
that some of the wounded were Iranians. Iranians are frequent
visitors to the shrine dedicated to a granddaughter of the Prophet
Mohammed.
Hassan Abdel Azim, spokesman for the opposition reformist group
the Damascus Declaration, told al-Jazeera TV that the Syrian
opposition condemned the explosion and regarded it as 'an act of
terrorism.'
He said that Damascus Declaration and the democratic opposition in
Syria rejected any act of violence and were working for peaceful and
stable democratic change in the country.
Abdel Azim called on the country's regime to open up to Syrian
society so as 'to remove any tensions and to achieve national unity.'
The last major bombing in Damascus occurred in February, when
Imad Mughniyah - a commander in the Lebanese Shiite militant group
Hezbollah - was killed. The Lebanese militant had been wanted by the
United States on charges of terrorism.
The US and Israel accuse Syria of supporting Hezbollah and
radical Palestinian groups.
In contrast to its neighbours Lebanon and Iraq, Syria with its
extensive secret service network is rarely the victim of bomb
attacks.
Critics of President Bashar al-Assad have alleged after previous
attacks that the secret service itself had orchestrated them in order
to give the impression that Syria too was threatened by Islamic
extremism.
In recent weeks, the Iraqi government repeatedly stressed that
Syria had changed its policies and was now making efforts to prevent
the movement of terrorists into Iraq across the countries' common
border.
USA
Your Talkback on this Story