Suicide bomb kills four in Beirut

Reuters, Beirut :
A suicide bomber killed four people on Tuesday in a residential neighborhood of southern Beirut known for its support of Shi’ite military and political group Hezbollah, security sources said.
A Reuters reporter said she saw the remains of what appeared to be the suicide attacker at the site of the blast as emergency workers transported wounded people from the area, where a similar bombing occurred earlier this month.
Images broadcast on Hezbollah’s Al Manar channel showed flames erupting from a building and a thick plume of smoke billowing over a street near the charred remains of cars as a crowd gathered at the site of the blast.
It was not immediately clear what the blast had targeted. The explosion went off on a busy street of small shops and restaurants in the Haret Hreik area of Beirut’s largely Shi’ite southern suburbs.
Tensions from the nearly three-year conflict in Syria have increasingly infected neighboring Lebanon, which is still struggling to recover from its own 1975-1990 civil war and has been without a fully functioning government since March.