An anti-Syrian Lebanese MP was killed yesterday in a large car bomb explosion in east Beirut just one week before parliament is scheduled to elect a new president.

His death almost guarantees that the presidential vote will not be held on time and threatens to worsen a political crisis which has gridlocked the country for almost a year and sparked fears of civil war.

Antoine Ghanem, a Christian MP, died immediately along with at least nine other people when a suspected car bomb packed with an estimated 40 kilogrammes of explosive blew up at a junction of a busy street in the Sin al-Fil district of Beirut during the early evening rush hour.

A member of the mainly Christian Maronite Phalange Party, Mr Ghanem, 64, is the eighth prominent anti-Syrian figure to be assassinated since February 2005 when former Lebanese prime minister Rafik Hariri died in a massive car bomb blast in downtown Beirut.

A United Nations investigation into the murders has suggested that Syria was responsible. Damascus has denied any involvement in the killings.

The blast rocked the eastern half of the city and a tall plume of black smoke rose into the sky. Firemen hosed down the burning wrecks of at least a dozen cars scattered along the street. Broken masonry blasted from surrounding buildings and shops carpeted the streets of this upmarket Christian neighbourhood.

“Where’s my brother?” cried a distraught Ziad Ghosn treading through a gutted second floor apartment overlooking the bomb site. The rooms closest to the explosion were littered with smashed furniture and broken glass. A trail of blood led out of the apartment.

Makram Azzi, 65, a retired pilot for Middle East Airlines, Lebanon’s national flag carrier, was sitting in his first floor apartment when the bomb exploded in the street below.

“I heard a huge bang and my front door was blown off its hinges and hurled into the apartment,” he said, eyes wide in shock.

Lebanese troops and police sealed off the scene as detectives pulled on rubber gloves and began an inspection. The body of one man in a dark suit and blood-soaked white shirt lay on the pavement beside Mr Ghanem’s wrecked and burn-out Chevrolet. An automatic pistol lay beside the corpse. It was unclear whether it was Mr Ghanem or one of his bodyguards.

The remains of another person lay in the driver’s seat. It took five Red Cross workers to tease what was left of the victim from the twisted metal of the car onto a stretcher.

Mr Ghanem had returned to Lebanon just two days earlier, one of many anti-Syrian MPs who spent the summer overseas because of death threats. The bomb blast occurred a few hundred yards from the office of Amine Gemayel, a former Lebanese president whose son, Pierre, was shot dead last November. In June, Walid Eido, a Sunni MP, was killed in a car bomb blast.

Mr Ghanem had returned to Beirut to participate in the presidential election scheduled to begin next Tuesday to replace the current incumbent Emile Lahoud, a close ally of Damascus whose term expires on November 24.

A member of the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, Mr Ghanem’s death narrows the block’s lead to just three seats over the opposition, led by the militant Shia Muslim Hezbollah. No clear consensus presidential candidate has emerged and with the anti- and pro-Syrian factions at loggerheads, analysts believe that the crisis will persist until the end of Mr Lahoud’s mandate.

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