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Victims of 1983 attack on US Embassy in Beirut recalled
The explosion shook the earth. And it wouldn't be the last one. Twenty-five years ago Friday, a suicide bomber drove a pickup truck full of explosives into the U.S. Embassy in downtown Beirut, killing 63 people. It heralded the rise in the Middle East of a soon-to-be common tool in the arsenal of radicals: the suicide bomb."I don't think we realized on April 18 the significance of the attack," said Graeme Bannerman, a former Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff director who shuttled between Beirut and Washington during much of the early 1980s. "It was a disaster. But most people didn't realize we had a problem with these guys until 9/11." Bombing survivors, victims' relatives, diplomats and embassy staff gathered Friday to remember the dead at a somber ceremony on the grounds of the heavily guarded hilltop U.S. mission in Lebanon, the Mediterranean Sea spreading out below. "We remember today and every day our colleagues, relatives and friends who died at the hands of those terrorists during Lebanon's terrible war years," said Michele J. Sison, Washington's envoy to Lebanon. The event commemorated not only those who died and survived the bombing of the Beirut embassy, but also the bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks the following year, in which 241 American military personnel died, and the Sept. 20, 1984, attack here in Aukar, in the Christian hills north of Beirut, at what was then called the U.S. Embassy annex, in which 24 people perished. Embassy employees, tearful Lebanese survivors and a contingent of visiting Marines gathered around and laid wreaths upon the half-circular monument engraved with the names of the those who died. "They came in peace," it said. As a choir sang, an elderly Lebanese woman with a bent back hobbled with her cane to the monument and brushed her fingers against the name Rudaina Sahyoun, her daughter, who died in the embassy explosion three months after she began working for the Americans. She was 28. C. David Welch, U.S. assistant secretary of State for Near East affairs, described the moment he heard about the attack as the Lebanon desk officer at the State Department. "I will never forget receiving the call to alert me of the attack," he said at the ceremony. "It was quite a blow." Islamic Jihad, a previously unknown group, claimed responsibility. Court rulings later pointed to Iran and the Iranian-backed Shiite militia Hezbollah as having a role in the embassy and barracks attacks. "Since the Beirut attack, we and citizens of many countries have suffered more attacks at the hands of Hezbollah and other terrorists, backed by the regimes in Tehran and Damascus, which use terror and violence against innocent civilians," President Bush said in a statement released Friday.. Posted by: ryuge 2008-04-19 |
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