A bomb killed a senior member of Lebanese guerrilla group Hizbollah in the southern suburbs of Beirut yesterday in an attack the group blamed on Israel.

Witnesses said the wreckage of a Mercedes car lay in the road, its glass shattered. Blood stained the road beside it.

In a statement, Hizbollah said the blast killed Ghalib Awali ? who it called ?part of the Islamic Resistance?s cadre? ? as he left his home at about 0530 GMT. Hizbollah?s TV station, which broke into programming to announce the blast, called him a member of the group?s leadership.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast. An official of Hizbollah, which played a leading role in helping to end Israel?s 22-year occupation of south Lebanon in 2000, pointed the finger at the Jewish state and hinted at retribution.

?It is an attempt to destabilise the resistance and Lebanon, and we see in it the hand of the Zionist enemy,? Sheikh Hassan Ezzeddine told Reuters. ?The enemy bears complete responsibility for what it has done.?

<B>Leader assassinated</B>

Israel assassinated the group?s leader Abbas al-Mussawi in 1992 in an air strike on his car, and Lebanon has tried and convicted several people in recent years of spying on and plotting against the Iranian and Syrian-backed group.

There was no immediate comment from Israel, which in recent months has stepped up its rhetoric against Hizbollah, calling the group a major backer of Palestinian militants in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The blast recalled the killings of two Lebanese whom Israel accused of links to Hizbollah and al Qaeda. Locals blamed those killings on Israel?s Mossad, a charge the Jewish state neither confirmed nor denied.

A car bomb last year in the same part of Beirut killed a Hizbollah member whom security sources and witnesses had identified as an employee of the Iranian embassy in the Lebanese capital.

Since helping drive Israel from south Lebanon, Hizbollah brokered a swap of the remains of Israeli soldiers it captured in a disputed border zone and a reservist it abducted for Lebanese captives in Israel, including senior Hizbollah figures.

The group has vowed to secure the release of Samir al-Qantar, a Lebanese held over the killing of four Israelis in 1979, for which Israel demands information about the fate of Ron Arad, an Israeli airman who went missing while bombing Lebanon in 1986.

Hizbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah has said the group would kidnap more Israelis if Qantar was not released.

Sources close to talks on the proposed swap said earlier this year that Arad was dead. Israel has said that remains it received from Lebanon after the first stage of the prisoner swap in January were not Arad?s.

<B>Mohammad Azakir</B>