BEIRUT, Lebanon -- A woman from a pro-Syrian party set off a car bomb Thursday near a checkpoint of the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army militia, killing herself and wounding 13 people, police and party officials said.
Police said the woman, driving a car packed with 300 pounds of explosives, triggered the bomb in Jezzine, a Christian refuge about 25 miles southeast of Beirut.
The blast scattered the woman's body about the square, damaged the army position and wounded 13 people, among them seven members of the Israel-backed SLA, police said.
The explosion blasted a deep crater in the street, damaged five buildings, set four cars parked in the square on fire and shattered windows as far as 100 yards away.
The Syrian Socialist Nationalist Party, a secular leftist group founded in 1932 with the goal of merging Lebanon and Syria, claimed responsiblitity for the bombing. It said the driver was a woman who belonged to the group.
'We carried out the attack,' party spokesman Rafik Wehbe said. 'She is a member of the party.'
Syria is the largest foreign power broker in Lebanon and has about 25,000 troops stationed there, including forces that patrol Moslem west Beirut.
After the bombing a west Beirut television station broadcast an interview with the woman, identified as Norma Abi Hassan, 29. The interview was taped shortly before she drove to Jezzine to carry out the attack.
Hassan, clad in military fatigues and sitting at a table in front of a photograph of the group's founder, Antoun Saade, a Christian Lebanese, said she was glad for being chosen to explode the explosives.
'I am the martyr Norma from the northern city of Tripoli,' she said. 'I salute comrade Hafez Assad (the Syrian president) for blessing the national resistance.'
After the broadcast, dozens of unarmed young Syrian Socialist National Party members carrying the group's flag and singing nationalistic songs toured the streets of west Beirut to express joy over the car-bombing.
The suicide attack was the second this year against the pro-Israeli militia. In April a Lebanese from the pro-Syrian Arab Socialist Baath party exploded a car bomb at a South Lebanon Army checkpoint near the village of Kawkaba, 12 miles north of the Israeli border.
About 1,800 of the pro-Israeli militiamen control Jezzine, situated inside the so-called 'security zone' Israel established in south Lebanon when it withdrew the bulk of its forces in June 1985.
Thousands of Christians have sought refuge in Jezzine after being driven out of a cluster of villages east of the southern port of Sidon in bitter fighting with Moslem and Palestinian factions last year.
Shortly before the explosion in Jezzine, a car packed with 225 pounds of TNT was found by a South Lebanon Army team at a checkpoint in Dahr el Ramlet area, 2 miles from the town. Militia members arrested the driver and destroyed the car in the hills of Jezzine.
