At least 40 die in attack on refugee camp

LEBANESE troops battled Islamist militants based in a Palestinian refugee camp yesterday and more than 40 people were killed in Lebanon’s bloodiest internal fighting since the 1975-90 civil war.

At least 23 soldiers and 19 militants died in the clashes, which erupted before dawn on the edge of the Nahr al-Bared camp and in the nearby Sunni Muslim city of Tripoli in north Lebanon.

The clashes between troops surrounding the Nahr el-Bared camp and Fatah Islam fighters began after police raided a militant-occupied apartment on a main thoroughfare in Tripoli and a gunbattle erupted, witnesses said.