A senior Lebanese police officer and 10 other people were killed this morning when a powerful car bomb exploded in an east Beirut suburb.

The mid-morning explosion is the latest in a string of assassinations over the past three years targeting politicians, journalists and lately security officials.

Captain Wissam Eid died instantly when his vehicle was struck by the bomb placed in a car parked beside the main Beirut-Damascus road. Bodies were hurled into the air and landed on an overpass above the scene. At least 30 other people were wounded in the blast which shook eastern Beirut and sent a towering pillar of black smoke into the clear blue sky. Some 20 other vehicles were damaged or destroyed by the car bomb which left a deep mud crater on the side of the road.

Soldiers sealed off the bombsite as ambulances and fire engines, sirens wailing, raced to the scene. Rescue workers carrying stretchers once more faced the terrible task of extracting shattered bodies from the twisted and tangled fire-blackened ruins of vehicles. The windows were blown out in a four-storey office block housing the Nokia mobile phone dealership overlooking the scene.

“Thank God everyone is okay. There was only material damage and that can be replaced,” said an employee as he watched workers sweeping shattered glass from the floor.

Clutching her teenage daughter’s hand, a woman, her face wet with tears and stricken with worry, pushed her way through the crowd of onlookers toward the office building. Catching sight of her husband, she ran and hugged him.

“Thank God you are safe,” she sobbed.

Like other recent bombings, there was no immediate claim of responsibility for the attack. Captain Eid was a member of the intelligence branch of the Internal Security Forces, a paramilitary police force. Brigadier General Ashraf Rifi, the head of the ISF, inspected the site of the blast. He told reporters that Captain Eid had been involved in the investigations of other recent bombings and assassinations.

The frequency of bombings has increased lately as Lebanon’s deep political crisis intensifies. A Lebanese army general was blown up in December. This month, separate bombs targeted a vehicle driven by Irish United Nations peacekeepers and an armour-plated car belonging to the American embassy.

Anti-Syrian Lebanese politicians blame Damascus for the strife, accusing it of seeking to re-impose its hegemony over its tiny neighbour. Syria was forced to disengage from Lebanon in 2005 following mass protests in Beirut combined with international pressure.

The pro-Syrian opposition has warned that it could launch a civil disobedience campaign in an attempt to bring down the Western-backed government. A transport union strike on yesterday was seen as the first step in the campaign.

But many Lebanese fear that if the political disputes are taken to the street, the situation could easily spill out of control.

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