1985 Beirut Car Bombing

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The 8 March 1985 Beirut car bombing was an attempted car bomb assassination of leading Hezbollah Shi'a Muslim cleric Sheikh Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah in Beirut, Lebanon, in which more than 80 people were killed and 175 were injured. Some United States press reports said the United States (through the Central Intelligence Agency) was behind the attack, as they had claimed Fadlallah had given support to the 1983 attacks on military headquarters in Beirut, in which hundreds of U.S. and French soldiers were killed.

Fadlallah has always denied the charge and later accused Israel and its "internal allies" of being behind the explosion and he gave a warning to "all those who are playing with fire" that their hands will be "burned by the flames". The blast came at a particularly sensitive time as the Israelis were trying to complete their withdrawal from Lebanon, and United States forces were stationed to bolster the Christian government.

The bomb explosion occurred in a densely populated Shi'a suburb, outside a block of flats and close to a mosque, as worshippers were gathering for Friday evening prayers. It blew a huge crater in the street and destroyed two seven-storey blocks of flats, a mosque, and a cinema. Many of the dead were passers-by. The blast brought gunmen running on to the streets firing guns into the air to clear the roads for ambulances. Radio stations broadcast appeals for blood donors as fire fighters and civil defence workers tried to remove bodies from under the rubble. Fleets of ambulances jammed the entrance to west Beirut's main hospital which was soon packed with wounded and dead.

The bombing was the worst attack in the Lebanese capital since November 1983 when 61 people were killed in a suicide car bomb attack in the southern port of Tyre (which is not Lebanon’s capital).