A small amount of plastic explosives were found at the weekend in a garbage truck entering a UN base in southern Lebanon and two suspects were detained, a United Nations military spokesman told AFP on Monday.
"Yesterday, during a routine check of a garbage truck outside the Italian base of the UN force deployed in southern Lebanon (UNIFIL) we found a modest quantity of explosives," Colonel Enrico Mattina said. "The driver and another worker, along with the explosives, were handed over to the Lebanese Armed Forces," he added. Officer Joseph Flebuf, a member of the Italian battalion based in the town of Tebnin, told AFP that the plastic explosives were found inside a metal tool box at the front of the garbage truck.
A spokesman for the Lebanese army said the two suspects detained were Lebanese nationals and that the explosives seized amounted to 20 grams. He had no further details. UNIFIL has some 13,000 troops from various countries stationed in southern Lebanon. The force, which was set up in 1978 to monitor the border between Israel and Lebanon, was considerably boosted in the wake of Israel's 2006 war on Lebanon.
Since then, it has been the target of three attacks by unknown elements, the latest being in January of last year when two Irish officers were wounded by a roadside bomb. In the deadliest incident, three Spanish and three Colombian peacekeepers were killed in June of 2007 when a booby-trapped car exploded as their patrol vehicle drove by. A month later, a vehicle belonging to the Tanzanian contingent was damaged in a bomb blast, but there were no casualties.
UNIFIL last week said it had boosted the number of troops deployed in southern Lebanon after rockets from the area were launched on northern Israel, prompting fears of another front opening in the Gaza war.
Continued on Page 47
Posted by: Fred ||
01/13/2009 00:00 ||
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"three attacks by unknown elements"
Hmmm, who could that be ?
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
