Blast kills Lebanese weapons manufacturer for Syrian insurgents

A blast in northern Lebanon has killed a homemade weapons manufacturer as he was working on a machine gun for the foreign-backed insurgents fighting against the Syrian government.

A Lebanese security official said on Sunday that the man, identified as Marwan al-Qassab, was trying to make a DShK heavy machine gun to be smuggled into neighboring Syria to support the insurgents when the explosion rocked his workshop.

“Marwan al-Qassab had a small, illicit weapons factory in the town of Minieh,” 10 kilometers (six miles) north of the coastal city of Tripoli, the official said on condition of anonymity.

“Members of the security forces rushed to the scene, and found his body shredded by the blast,” he added.

Syria has been experiencing unrest since March 2011. Damascus says outlaws, saboteurs, and armed terrorists are the driving factor behind the unrest and deadly violence while the opposition accuses the security forces of being behind the killings.

The Syrian government says that the chaos is being orchestrated from outside the country, and there are reports that a very large number of the armed militants are foreign nationals, mostly from Egypt, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan.