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. Hardline Iranian group marks 1983 Beirut bombing of US marine barracks
TEHRAN (AFP) Dec 02, 2004
A hardline Iranian group on Thursday unveiled a monument at Tehran's main cemetery in memory of the "martyrs" who carried out the 1983 bombing of a US marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 troops.

Some 200 people gathered at the Behesteh Zahra complex just south of the capital to see a monument about 1.5 meters (5 feet) high that features sculpted images of US troops picking up dead bodies.

With photographers also present at the unveiling ceremony, spectators were told by organisers to cover their faces.

The group staging the event calls itself the "Committee for the Glorification of Martyrs of the Global Islamic Movement", and in recent months has been active at official events encouraging volunteers for suicide operations to register with them.

One of the group's members told AFP that it has already formed a 300-strong suicide squad codenamed "Yahya Ayyash", after a bombmaker of the Palestinian Islamic radical group Hamas killed by Israel in 1996.

The group insists it has no links to Iran's hardline clerical regime, and Iranian government officials have said they will prevent the organisation from doing anything more than "symbolic".

The US marines whose deaths were celebrated were killed on October 23, 1983, when a 19-tonne explosives-laden truck rammed through protective barricades at the compound entrance and detonated in front of the Beirut barracks, demolishing the building.

In a statement, the Iranian group hailed the attack as "the largest ever martyrdom-seeking (suicide) operation against the infidels".

US court papers from a suit filed last year by family members of the dead and wounded marines described the blast as "the largest non-nuclear explosion that had ever been detonated on the face of the Earth".

US troops had been deployed in Lebanon earlier that year as part of a UN-sponsored multinational peacekeeping force in hopes of cooling the Lebanese civil war.

The attack was blamed on the radical Shiite Muslim fundamentalist group Hezbollah, which received major support from Iran.

In June 2003, a US district judge ruled that "the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Iranian Ministry of Information and Security are jointly liable" for the attack and should pay compensation.

Iran dismissed the ruling as "provoked by the Zionists".

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