Bombers rock Beirut

Two suicide bombings rocked Iran's embassy compound in Lebanon yesterday, killing at least 23 people including an Iranian cultural attache and hurling bodies and wreckage across a debris-strewn street.

A Lebanon-based al-Qaeda-linked group, the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, claimed responsibility and threatened further attacks unless Iran withdraws forces from Syria, where they have backed President Bashar al-Assad's two-and-year-old war against rebels.

Security camera footage showed a man in an explosives belt rushing towards the outer wall of the embassy before blowing himself up, Lebanese officials said. They said a car bomb parked two buildings away from the compound had caused the second, deadlier explosion.

The Lebanese army, however, said both blasts were suicide attacks.

In a Twitter post, Sheikh Sirajeddine Zuraiqat, the religious guide of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, said the group had carried out the attack.

"It was a double martyrdom operation by two of the Sunni heroes of Lebanon," he wrote.

Lebanon has suffered a series of sectarian clashes and bomb attacks on Sunni and Shi'ite Muslim targets which have been linked to the Syrian conflict and which killed scores of people this year.

Yesterday's bombing took place on the eve of more talks between world powers and Iran over Teheran's disputed nuclear programme.

The bombs also struck as Assad's forces extended their military gains in Syria before peace talks which the United Nations hopes to convene in mid-December and which Iran says it is ready to attend.

Shi'ite Iran actively supports Assad against mostly Sunni rebels and, along with Hezbollah fighters, it has helped turn the tide in Assad's favour at the expense of rebels backed and armed by Sunni powers Saudi Arabia and Qatar.

"At one entrance of the Iranian embassy I counted six bodies outside," Reuters television cameraman Issam Abdullah said. "I saw body parts thrown two streets away."

The embassy's sturdy metal gate was twisted by the blasts, which Lebanon's Health Minister Ali Hassan Khalil said killed 23 people and wounded 146.

Britain's Foreign Secretary William Hague condemned what he described as a "shocking terrorist attack" and France expressed "solidarity with the Lebanese and Iranian authorities".