Lebanon Experiences Worst Mass Shooting In Years As Gunman Terrorizes Quiet Town

In South Beirut, Lebanon, a single gunman shot and killed several people in an indiscriminate attack that is being described by analysts as the deadliest mass shooting in the recent history of Lebanon.

According to a security source, there was still no clear motivation behind the mass shooting that happened on Tuesday.

The gunman attacked in the quiet town of Baakline, in the Chouf Mountains, according to information obtained by Al Jazeera. Lebanese authorities are conducting investigations and hunting for the shooter.

The victims of the shooting, all of whom were killed, include a woman, six men and two children.

Speaking on the matter, a source who did not want to be identified since they were not permitted to talk about the incident said that in the group of victims, there were six Syrian nationals and three Lebanese.

Baakline's town mayor, Abdullah al-Ghussaini, released a statement in which he said the shooter used a hunting weapon in the attack and shot at random.

The scene of the shooting was a wooded area close to Baakline that is also known to be a residential area for Syrian workers.

Syrian workers have always come to Lebanon in search of seasonal work, and even more Syrian nationals have fled to Lebanon ever since the Syrian civil war broke out nine years ago.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Lebanon has already registered more than nine hundred thousand refugees from Syria.

The UNHCR, however, estimates more than one million, five hundred thousand Syrian refugees are living in Lebanon, with the number expected to rise.

Lebanon's fifteen-year civil war that stopped in 1990 resulted in many guns leftover from the conflict, and many people have weapons in the country.

Despite all this, mass shootings are not that frequent of an occurrence in Lebanon.

The last one was in 2019 March, when was a shooting incident involving one off duty soldier and four migrant workers.

The shooting occurred in the Bekaa Valley town of Zahle, and one of the victims died.

In 2019 June, a shooter suspected of being a former ISIS militia fighter killed two police and two soldiers in Tripoli Lebanon.

A fourteen-year-old boy back in 2017 shot and killed four people in Beirut using a pump-action shotgun. There was another shooting in 2002 when an employee of the education ministry in Lebanon shot his colleagues, killing eight and wounding several.