(Beirut) Twenty people were arrested in total after shootings at the American embassy on Wednesday, including the attacker, a Syrian claiming to be acting to support Gaza, a judicial source told AFP on Saturday.
The army indicated that it had injured the attacker, before arresting him and taking him to hospital.
The American embassy, located in an ultra-secure complex in the northern suburbs of Beirut, assured that all its members were safe.
The number of people arrested in connection with the investigation into the attack on the American embassy “reaches 20, including the Syrian perpetrator of the operation, Qais Farraj, who is receiving treatment at the military hospital of Beirut,” said the judicial source who spoke on condition of anonymity,
Among these people are his father, his brother, religious people who gave him lessons, and “people with whom he was in continuous contact,” the same source who supervises the investigations carried out by the security services told AFP. intelligence of the Lebanese army and the police.
Investigators are trying to determine whether they are linked to the “Islamic State (IS) jihadist group or other terrorist organizations,” she added.
“The data available so far excludes the hypothesis of an organized operation. »
On the evening of the attack, the US State Department said that Washington was “aware that the individual who was arrested was wearing what appeared to be the insignia of ISIS”, adding “to conduct a thorough investigation with the Lebanese authorities on the real motivations.”
On Wednesday, a judicial source told AFP that the shooter had claimed “to have carried out this attack to support Gaza”, a Palestinian territory devastated by the war between Israel and the Islamist movement Hamas.