A bomb explosion rocked a Christian suburb of the Lebanese capital, Beirut, shortly after midnight, injuring at least nine people. VOA's Sonja Pace went to the blast site in the Jdeideh neighborhood Saturday morning, and she has this description of the aftermath from the scene.
Well, hours after the explosion, the area has been cordoned off. There are police and security forces all over, and people are literally picking up the pieces. There are shards of glass everywhere, because windows were blown out of storefronts, of apartment buildings in the area.
It's a fairly densely populated neighborhood, and the area where - the building in front of which the bomb exploded, the bottom three floors, the front of the building was torn off. And, you can see people really standing in their apartments now, sort of picking through the rubble, picking through the pieces. Windows were blown out. In other apartment buildings right around, and shop windows, and so people are here busy picking up the glass shards.
A lot of people have obviously come from the neighborhood to see what has happened here. They sort of just shake their heads, and, there is certainly a sense of concern, since this car-bombing comes just a little over a month after the massive car bomb explosion that killed the very popular former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.