Four killed in Damascus gun battle

Four people were killed and two wounded when gunmen and police fought an armed battle in a diplomatic quarter of the Syrian capital Damascus, officials said.

A police officer, a passer-by and two suspected terrorists were among the dead and two suspects were wounded in last night’s gun battle, they said.

The gunfight in the Mazza district of west Damascus centred on an empty former UN building and lasted around 70 minutes, an Interior Ministry official said.

Officials accused terrorists for the first such violence in Syria in years. Smoke billowed from Mazza late into the evening. A UN spokeswoman confirmed that a UN building may have been hit.

Four gunmen detonated a car bomb before security forces surrounded the group and an exchange of gunfire ensued, Syria’s UN Ambassador Fayssal Mekdad told Associated Press Television News.

The gunmen tried to flee in another car while hurling hand grenades at security forces, the Interior Ministry official said. Two attackers, an officer and a woman who was in the area were killed in the ensuing gunfight, the official said.

Mekdad added that two other suspects were seriously wounded.

“Syria has always condemned terrorism and terrorist actions,” he said. “We think the overall situation in the region contributes to such a situation. However, Syria will never tolerate such groups neither inside or outside Syria. Our long struggle against terrorism is well known.”

In neighbouring Iraq, terrorists have twice bombed the UN headquarters in the capital, Baghdad, since the US-led war began last year. The first, on August 19, killed 22 people, including top UN envoy Sergio Vieira de Mello.

UN spokeswoman Marie Okabe confirmed that a building formerly occupied by the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), which oversees an agreement between Israeli and Syrian forces in the Golan Heights, may have been hit in the attack.

“Our preliminary information is that all UN staff and facilities are safe and accounted for,” she said in New York.

A UN employee in Damascus said UN offices in the capital, including the UN Development Fund and its Children’s Fund, were ordered closed today.

Syria’s ambassador to the US said the attackers’ motives were unclear.

“It’s very early to tell what the attackers’ motives (were) or who they are,” Ambassador Imad Moustapha told The Associated Press by telephone from Washington.

Mazza is home to the British ambassador’s residence, offices of the Iranian state news agency, the Iranian Embassy and the Canadian Embassy. British and Iranian diplomatic officials said their embassies were not targeted in the attack.

The state news agency SANA said authorities later found the suspects’ hideout in Khan al-Sheih, 18 miles south west of Damascus, and confiscated weapons and explosives.