Suicide bomber killed 241 American troops 25 years ago in barracks
October 23, 2008
Twenty-five years ago today, a suicide bomber steered a truck loaded with the equivalent of six tons of TNT down the airport road in Beirut, Lebanon. He plowed into the four-story barracks where more than 300 U.S. troops from a U.N. peacekeeping mission slept and detonated what the FBI called the largest non-nuclear bomb in history.
The explosion and fireball pulverized the concrete fortress, killing 241 U.S. service members, most of them Marines. A second blast minutes later at the compound of the French peacekeeping force killed 58 more Western troops. Three months later, President Ronald Reagan pulled the Americans out of Beirut.
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