Lebanese Troops Shell Palestinian Refugees

Lebanese troops today shelled a Palestinian refugee camp, a day after more than 55 people were killed in fighting between Sunni militants and government forces.

Tank shells crashed into the coastal camp of Nahr el-Bared, home to some 40,000 refugees, near the northern city of Tripoli. Plumes of smoke rose into the sky as fighters of the little-known Fatah al-Islam group fired grenades and machineguns at army posts on the camp perimeter, witnesses said.

Palestinian sources in the camp said the shelling had killed two civilians.

As Lebanese forces fired on the camp, witnesses said imams used loudspeakers to call on the army to stop the shelling.

At least 27 soldiers, 15 militants and 15 civilians died in yesterday's violence, the worst internal fighting since Lebanon's 1975-90 civil war.

The clashes were the latest blow to a country recovering from war with Israel last summer and still in the grip of a political crisis between the western-backed government of Fouad Siniora and the Hizbullah-led opposition.

Lebanon has several refugee camps that are home to about 400,000 Palestinians who fled the 1948 war after the creation of Israel.

Lebanese officials said one of the men killed in yesterday's fighting was a suspect in a failed German train bombing - an indication that the camp had become a refuge for militants planning attacks outside Lebanon.

Saddam El-Hajdib was the fourth-highest ranking official in the Fatah al-Islam group, a Lebanese official said. He had also been on trial in absentia in Lebanon in connection with the failed German plot and is the brother of another suspect in custody in Germany.

Fatah al-Islam, a Sunni Muslim group inspired by al-Qaida, is thought to have only a few hundred fighters. Palestinian factions still carry weapons inside the camps, despite a 2004 UN security council resolution calling for all militias in Lebanon to be disarmed.

The Lebanese army is not allowed to enter the country's 12 Palestinian refugee camps under a 1969 Arab accord.

Lebanese media have criticised the authorities for not tackling Fatah al-Islam before.

"Who is responsible for the army's massacre in the Fatah al-Islam ambush?" asked as-Safir, a pro-opposition daily, referring to a militant attack on an army patrol on Sunday.

Fatah al-Islam's leader, Shaker al-Abssi, was sentenced to death in Jordan in absentia for the 2002 killing of a US diplomat. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida in Iraq who was killed last year, received a death sentence for the same crime. Abssi, a Palestinian guerrilla in his 50s, was jailed in Syria and fled to Lebanon after he was released last year. Major Palestinian factions have dissociated themselves from Fatah al-Islam.