BEIRUT — A powerful car bomb flung glass and heavy strips of metal across a wide intersection in downtown Beirut on Friday, killing a former cabinet minister and underscoring Lebanon’s growing instability as it absorbs the impact of neighboring Syria’s increasingly bloody civil war.
Mohamad Chatah, a senior aide to former prime minister Saad Hariri and a member of Lebanon’s Future Movement party, was killed in the blast. Chatah, a Sunni Muslim, served as Hariri’s finance minister and was Lebanon’s ambassador to the United States from 1997 to 2000.

At least four other people were also killed in the explosion and 75 were injured, Lebanon’s Health Ministry said. The blast, which shook the center of Lebanon’s capital around 9:40 a.m., set several nearby cars on fire, shattered the facades of high-end apartment and office buildings and sent a large column of smoke into the sky.
A civil defense official at the scene said the death toll could rise.
Firefighters, paramedics and soldiers in uniform rushed shouting across the smoldering wreckage in the minutes after the blast. The twisted wreckage of two cars — one of which soldiers said carried the bomb — sat smoking in pools of black water littered with pieces of human flesh. Glass and debris lay scattered across a nearly quarter-mile radius in a central neighborhood just blocks from Lebanon’s parliament and government buildings.
An employee in an adjacent office building, who gave his name only as Nader, said he rushed downstairs in panic following the blast. “The first thing I saw was half of a woman in the garden next to the trees, and then a man who had a piece of metal in his head, dead on the ground,” he said.
Paramedics and forensic investigators gathered body parts into bags and photographed a meter-wide crater in the street that soldiers said appeared to be the blast site. One soldier stood among a cluster of other officers, holding what appeared to be a portion of a human skull between his fingers.
Chatah and the political party to which he belonged — Hariri’s Future Movement — were vocal opponents of the powerful Lebanese Shiite militant group and political party Hezbollah, which backs the regime of President Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Chatah regularly criticized both Assad and his backers, Hezbollah and Iran, and he tweeted cynical remarks about the diminishing potential for stability in Lebanon as he watched it become increasingly destabilized by the 2 1/2-year civil war in Syria.
The war in Syria has swept up regional powers, including Hezbollah, which has sent fighters into Syria to support Assad, and hundreds of thousands of refugees have spilled into neighboring countries.
A series of bombings and assassinations in recent months has targeted both Assad’s allies and foes inside Lebanon. A Hezbollah commander was killed in December, and a blast targeted Iranian officials outside Iran’s Beirut embassy the month before.
There were no immediate claims of responsibility for Friday’s explosion, but Chatah’s allies in the Future Movement swiftly blamed Hezbollah.
“Those who assassinated Mohamad Chatah are the ones who assassinated Rafiq al-Hariri, and who want to assassinate Lebanon and humiliate and weaken the State,” Saad Hariri said in a statement issued by his office.
Hariri’s father, former Lebanese prime minister Rafiq al-Hariri, was assassinated in a 2005 bombing that ignited a wave of popular opposition to Hezbollah and led to the expulsion of Syrian troops from Lebanon.
Four members of Hezbollah are set to go on trial at The Hague next month as the result of a four-year investigation by a U.N.-backed Special Tribunal for Lebanon. But none of the suspects are in custody.
Chatah was the latest of more than a dozen Hariri allies to be assassinated since 2005.
Hezbollah denied any link to Friday’s explosion, calling the bombing “heinous,” according to the organization’s al-Manar television network.
Minutes before the blast that killed him Friday, Chatah had tweeted in frustration about what he saw as Hezbollah’s continued abuse of power: “#Hezbollah is pressing hard to be granted similar powers in security & foreign policy matters that Syria exercised in Lebanon for 15 yrs.”
Speaking to a private Lebanese television channel hours after the blast, the country’s defense minister described Chatah as “a friend of mine, who was known for being moderate and for his love of this country.”
Defense Minister Fayez Ghosn told the Al-Jadeed television channel that he hoped Chatah’s death would motivate the citizens of this deeply divided nation to join together with “one policy: to talk to each other and to build a new Lebanon — for Lebanon cannot continue the way it is today.”
Others, including Chatah, have been less optimistic.
Sunni, Shiite and Christian groups backed by regional and international powers fought a devastating 15-year civil war that ended in 1990. Lebanon’s politics remain fraught with sectarian and regional tensions, its government currently staffed by caretaker ministers amid a political deadlock.
Nearly a million Syrian war refugees, most of them Sunni, have flooded into Lebanon in the past 2 1/2years, drastically altering the demographics of an otherwise tiny country that has pinned its stability on its ability to maintain a delicate sectarian balance.
On Christmas Eve, Chatah had lamented that a local Christian official’s calls for the Lebanese to maintain their neutrality, control of unlicensed weapons and their loyalty to the state were unlikely to gain any traction in the country’s current political environment . The patriarch’s pleas were “gifts Santa is unlikely to bring us, yet,” he wrote in a tweet.
The absence of justice years after Rafiq al-Hariri’s death has also underscored the weak government authorities that Lebanese complain are consistently undermined by corrupt politics, violence and intimidation across its political divide.
Even as investigators in white jumpsuits and gloves photographed, bagged and tagged evidence across Friday’s blackened crime scene, Future Movement officials and their supporters were already casting doubt on the potential for transparent justice.
“The signatories of the message do not hide their fingerprints,” Hariri said in his statement, without naming Hezbollah directly. “They will continue on the criminal path, and will insist on dragging Lebanon into the abyss of discord, as long as there is, in Lebanon, some who provide cover for those crimes.”
Liz Sly in London and Suzan Haidamous and Ahmed Ramadan in Beirut contributed to this report.