Anti-Assad Lebanese politician killed in powerful Beirut blast

A powerful bomb shook central Beirut Friday morning, rattling windows and sending a black plume of smoke into the sky.

Lebanese Red Cross officials reported five dead and 15 injured in the blast. The Associated Press, citing security officials, said Mohammed B Chattah, a former Lebanese government minister and ambassador to the United States, was among the victims and possibly the target.

LBC, a Lebanese television channel, also reported that the bomb targeted Chattah, a senior member of the Future bloc, the mainly Sunni party headed by Saad Hariri, the son of the former prime minister Rafik Hariri, who was killed in a 2005 bombing in Beirut.

Future is seen as supportive of the Syrian insurgency and close to Saudi Arabia, one of the insurgents' main international backers. Lebanon is deeply divided over the civil war in neighbouring Syria, with the Shia militia and political party Hezbollah supporting the Syrian government.

Chattah, in a Twitter message Friday morning, was critical of Hezbollah, saying it was seeking to gain similar powers in Lebanon to those that Syria had during its occupation of parts of the country from 1976 to 2005.

Local television broadcast images of the blast scene in front of the Starco complex, a downtown site notable for having survived unscathed through Lebanon's civil war from 1975 to 1990 that gutted much of the surrounding area.

Several dead bodies and many wounded people could be seen in the footage, and the sound of ambulances converging on the site of the explosion could be heard.

It is the first bomb to hit downtown Beirut in several years, although several car bombs have exploded in the southern suburbs in recent months.

The bombing on Friday brings the violence, which many believe is linked to the war in neighbouring Syria, to the heart of Beirut's downtown business district.