BEIRUT, Sept 27: A car bomb exploded near a mosque north of the Syrian capital as worshippers emerged from Friday prayers, killing at least 30 people, causing part of the building’s roof to collapse and littering the street with smouldering debris, activists said.
In Damascus, the United Nations said its team of weapons experts currently in Syria will investigate seven sites of alleged chemical attacks in the country, four more than previously known.
The announcement came a day after the five permanent members of the UN Security Council agreed on a resolution to eliminate Syria’s chemical weapons.
Friday’s blast, which struck outside the al-Sahel mosque in the town of Rankous, also wounded dozens of people, most of them civilians, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. It put the death toll at 30, and said it was not clear whether the mosque was the intended target. Mohammed Saeed, an activist in the eastern Damascus suburb of Douma, and the Observatory’s director Rami Abdul-Rahman both said the town is held neither by the rebels nor by the regime in Syria’s civil war. Abdul-Rahman said residents have an agreement with the rebels not to bring weapons into Rankous in order to avoid government shelling.
Saeed, who is in contact with activists in Rankous, about 40 kilometres north of Damascus, said residents held funerals for some of those killed in the bombing in line with Islamic tradition that calls for prompt burial. As people marched in one funeral, several rockets fired by government troops fell nearby, wounding some of the mourners, he said.
Car bombs, shelling and airstrikes have become common in the civil war, which has killed more than 100,000 people and driven another 7 million—around a third of the country’s pre-war population—from their homes since March 2011.
The fighting has shown no sign of abating and could complicate the mission of UN chemical weapons investigators who are back in Syria this week.
The UN office in Damascus said the team, which returned Wednesday, will visit seven sites that have been found to “warrant investigation” and are continuing to work “on a comprehensive report that it hopes will be ready by late October.’’—AP
