WORLD> Middle East
Car bomb kills 17 in Syria near intelligence office
(Agencies)
Updated: 2008-09-28 08:28

DAMASCUS, Syria - A brazen car bombing near a Syrian intelligence agency killed 17 people Saturday, the deadliest attack in decades as the country tries to boost its international profile.

The explosion came only hours after Syria's foreign minister held a rare meeting in New York with his American counterpart, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.


A Syrian boy, holds a toy bear as he stands in front of a destroyed toy shop, near the scene where a car bomb blew up in a southern neighborhood near the junction to the city's international airport, in Damascus, Syria, Saturday September 27, 2008. [Agencies] 


State-run television said a car packed with an estimated 440 pounds of explosives blew up on a road on the capital's southern outskirts, wounding dozens and shattering car and apartment windows. The charred booby-trapped car sat in the street near a primary school.

The blast knocked down part of a 13-foot-high wall surrounding a security service complex that houses several buildings in the Sidi Kadad neighborhood.

Syrian Interior Minister Bassam Abdul-Majid called the bombing a "terrorist act." He said all the victims were civilians, although at least one of the injured was a traffic policeman.

Officials provided no other details of the attack, which was the worst since a truck bomb killed dozens of people in the mid-1980s.

"We cannot accuse any party. There are ongoing investigations that will lead us to those who carried it out," Abdul-Majid told state TV.

Syria is home to Palestinian extremists and is a close ally of the Shiite Muslim militant group Hezbollah in neighboring Lebanon. Washington accuses Syria of being a state sponsor of terrorism and allowing Muslim militants to use its territory to cross into Iraq.

Syria denies that, arguing that it has an interest in fighting Islamic extremist groups like al-Qaida.

In September 2006, Islamic militants tried to storm the US Embassy in Damascus in an unusually bold attack in which three assailants and a Syrian guard were killed. Three months earlier, a battle between Syrian security forces and militants near the Defense Ministry left four militants and a police officer dead.

Officials blamed those attacks on Jund al-Sham, or Soldiers of Syria -- an al-Qaida offshoot that was established in Afghanistan.

Though Syria has long been viewed by the US as a destabilizing force in the Mideast, Damascus has been trying in recent months to change its image.

   Previous page 1 2 Next Page