A bomb blast Thursday in a Lebanese town near the Syrian border killed at least six people — among them a leading Muslim scholar — and injured five others, the official National News Agency reported.
The explosive “placed inside a motorcycle” went off outside the headquarters of the Muslim Scholars Committee, an organization that works with Syrian refugees and “conducts mediations” aimed at freeing those taken by al-Nusra Front. Al-Nusra Front is affiliated with al Qaeda and is among the groups fighting in Syria’s complex civil war to unseat President Bashar al-Assad.
Sheikh Othman Mansour, the head of Kalamoun Religious Scholars, was among the dead in the blast in the northeastern Lebanese town of Arsal, according to the state news agency.
Lebanon’s military court commissioner has ordered the security forces to launch an investigation into the explosion, National Media Agency delegate Huda Meniim said.
It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the bombing, including whether it was carried out by a militant group or was possibly a criminal matter.
Still, Lebanon, which has seen plenty of violence in recent decades, has been feeling the impact of the bloody civil war in neighboring Syria.
Part of that is from the flood of more than a million refugees into Lebanon, according to the United Nations.
Then there is the intermittent spillover violence. Most of that has happened near the Syrian border, though not all, as evidenced by a 2013 Beirut bombing that killed at least 23 people and wounded about 150 more.
