By Staff writer, Al Arabiya News Thursday, 5 November 2015

At least 10 were killed after a car bombing targeted an office belonging to Syrian religious scholars on Thursday in the northeastern town of Arsal in Lebanon near the Syrian border, Al Arabiya News Channel reported.

The bomb detonated in the Sabil neighborhood of Arsal, in an area where militants linked to the conflict across the border in Syria have carried out attacks in the past.

Emergency services were working to rescue people from the rubble, local media said, according to Reuters news agency.

Syrian scholars

Meanwhile, security sources said the blast was likely to have targeted an independent religious society made up of Syrian scholars.

The head of the society, Sheikh Othman Mansour, was among the dead, the sources said.

The last significant security incident in the area took place on Saturday, when Lebanon’s army fired at a vehicle carrying Islamist militants, killing three of them.

A separate attack by the Lebanese Shiite Muslim group Hezbollah in October killed five ISIS fighters elsewhere in the north of the country.

Arsal is a Sunni Muslim enclave in the mainly Shiite Bekaa Valley that hosts many Syrian refugees as well as rebel fighters in the surrounding countryside.