DAMASCUS, Sept 3: Five members of a militant were killed on Friday in clashes with Syrian security forces who raided their village hideout. “Anti-terrorist forces on Friday evening entered in force a hideout of the terrorist group Jund al Sham in a village of the Hama governorate,” 200 kilometres north of Damascus, said an interior ministry source.

“A clash followed in which the five members of the group were killed,” the source added, saying that two members of the security forces were also wounded.

Jund al Sham, or ‘Organization of the Soldiers of the Levant’, was first heard of in March when an Internet statement in its name claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a theatre in Qatar that killed a Briton.

It has also claimed the October bombings in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Taba which killed 34 people, most of them Israeli tourists and an oil refinery explosion in Texas that left 15 people dead.

These claims were posted on the Internet and it is not possible to verify their authenticity.

The interior ministry source said that the group was planning operations against Syria and had built up a cache of weapons at its base in the village of Jibril.

“The terrorist group was on the verge of executing operations to destabilize security and Syrian society,” the source said.— AFP