CAIRO, Sept. 27 -- A car carrying more than 400 pounds of explosives blew up in Syria's capital on Saturday, killing 17 people in at least the third deadly attack this year in the tightly policed Arab country.Interior Minister Bassim Abdel Majid said "terrorists" were responsible for Saturday's attack but told state television that officials did not know who carried it out. "We cannot blame any party," he said.
The bomb exploded Saturday morning in a neighborhood around the capital's Sayida Zaineb shrine, ripping the fronts off buildings and shattering car windows. The shrine attracts Shiite pilgrims in the majority Sunni Muslim nation. The apartments lining the crowded streets around the mosque are home to hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees, many of them poor, unemployed and undocumented.
News reports from Syria said the bombing occurred near a state security post. There were conflicting reports as to the nature of the post, with one opposition web site saying it was no more than a car park used by state security services.
Police barred all journalists except state television crews from the scene. Syrian television said all of those killed were civilians.
The attack follows a car bombing in February that killed Imad Mugniyeh, a security chief for Hezbollah, a Lebanese-based armed political movement that the United States and Israel consider a terrorist organization. Last month, a gunman shot to death a Syrian general who the Syrian opposition and Israeli officials said had been a top liaison between Syria and Hezbollah. Syria has not announced any arrests in those killings, and the identity of the killers and their motives remain a mystery.
Syria, under President Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000, and his son and successor Bashar al-Assad, has built one of the world's most extensive internal security systems.
| Which apparently isn't working so well ... |