Hizbullah Buries Fighter Killed in 'Syria Border Area'
More than 2,000 Hizbullah supporters gathered in the Bekaa Valley on Monday to bury one of their fighters who a security source said was killed in the border area with Syria.
Hussein Abdul Ghani al-Nimr, 35, "died while he was performing his jihadist duty," said a Hizbullah spokesman from the eastern city of Baalbek.
A security source told Agence France Presse that the Hizbullah member was "killed in the Lebanon-Syria border region and his body was taken back on Sunday."
The funeral comes less than a week after a senior Hizbullah commander, who Syrian rebels said was killed in Syria, was buried in the Bekaa.
An AFP correspondent said throngs of Hizbullah members marched in procession from a Baalbek area mosque to a cemetery alongside Nimr's fellow fighters who carried the body.
"He was a good man and a good fighter, and he died as a martyr serving his country and fellow Muslims," Hizbullah cleric Sheikh Mohammed Yazbek, who heads the party's religious council, told the crowd.
Hizbullah has announced several similar burials in past months, without elaborating on the circumstances of its members' deaths.
The opposition March 14 camp and Syrian rebels have repeatedly accused Hizbullah of aiding the Syrian regime of President Bashar Assad militarily.
Activists in the Syrian province of Homs told AFP on Monday that Hizbullah fighters have been taking part alongside government troops in fighting against rebels in the besieged town of Qusayr near the border with Lebanon.
Source: Agence France Presse, Naharnet
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