Anxiety grips Lebanon following blasts, arrests

The roadblocks and sandbags are back, cafes and hotels are nearly empty and many of the tourists are gone. Anxiety is gripping Lebanon following a spate of suicide bombings, and an ongoing security sweep targeting militants — some of them who had been staying in four-star Beirut hotels — has triggered a wave of cancellations of hotel and flight bookings in a country already on edge. The militants involved are said by security officials to be part of a network of alleged terrorist sleeper cells planning suicide bombings targeting security leaders and civilians alike. That has fueled concerns that Sunni extremists surging in Iraq and Syria were taking their fight to Lebanon next. Along Beirut's Mediterranean corniche, crowds are thinner. Not far away is the seaside Duroy hotel — one side of it still slightly blackened after a suicide bomber blew himself up during a police raid on his room on June 25. At the high-end Beirut Souks shopping complex in the downtown business district, the passages between shops are nearly empty of shoppers. ‘In the month or two before the incident at the Duroy, we were seeing a lot of Saudi, Iraqi tourists,’ said a 36-year-old bookstore manager in downtown Beirut. ‘We really thought that the start of this summer was better than the last one.’ ‘Then the bombings and arrests happened, and we didn't see them anymore,’ she added, asking to remain anonymous because she was not authorized by her employer to speak to journalists, according to Yahoo News.