ABSTRACT
Robert Fisk, veteran war correspondent of the London-based Independent, is back from Baghdad in February 2005 at his flat in Beirut. A bomb goes off down the road, and he writes:
I ran down the street towards the bombing. There were no cops, no ambulances yet, no soldiers, just a sea of flames in front of the St George’s Hotel. There were men and women round me, covered in blood, crying and shaking with fear. Twenty-two cars were burning, and in one of them I saw three men cowled in fire. A woman’s hand, a hand with painted fingernails, lay on the road. Why? Not bin Laden, I said to myself. Not here in Beirut. I was staggered by the heat, the flames that crept across the road, the petrol tanks of vehicles that would explode and spray fire around me every few seconds. On the ground was a very large man, lying on his back, his socks on fire, unrecogniszable … Then through the smoke, I found the crater. It was hot and I climbed gingerly into it. Two plain-clothes cops were already there, picking up small shards of metal. Fast work for detectives, I thought. And it was several days before I realized that – far from collecting evidence – they were hiding it, taking it from the scene of the crime. I came across an AP reporter, an old Lebanese friend. ‘I think it’s Hariri’s convoy,’ he said.
