DEATH-TRAP CITY CLAIMS FIVE MORE VICTIMS

LEBAI ted by street camp Beirut.

The children, who were aged five and below, died when fire ripped through the top floor of their tenement in Marystone Street. Three were brothers and the other two-a brother and sister-were their cousins.

Yesterday's deaths bring Shotton steel THE GOVERNMENT and the British Steel Corporation have rejected a Labour MP's plans for alternative steelmaking methods at the closure-threatened Shotton works.

Barry Jones, MP for East Flint, has produced a plan for improving the eiticlency of open-hearth steelmaking by using the submerged injection process.

The Department of Trade and Industry concedes that the efficiency of open hearth can be improved.

But Peter Emery, parliamentary secretary DTI, has told Jones that this in no way affects the Department's previous view that investment in the plan, simply as an insurance against delay on new plant, could be justified.

Lord Melchett, chairman of the BSC, also rejected the Jones plan.

Melchett told the MP there was a secure future for the cold-rolling, coating and finishing processes whịch Lebanon: Pitched battle against Arab guerrillas TESE troops supportanks fought a pitched battle yesterday near Palestinian refugee on the outskirts of Eyewitnesses reported a heavy exchange of fire between soldiers crouched in battle positions around the camp and armed men believed to be Palestinian commandos.

Troops took up firing positions around the camp in the streets and on at least one tall building overlooking the scene. Light tanks and armoured cars were brought up to reinforce them. initiated ttack on the campthe pretext that that Palestinians had kidnapped two Lebanese soldiers-culminates several weeks of tension in the capital.

In the past few days the authorities have arrested a number of Palestinians and other armed men during widespread controls and security checks.

Lebanese security forces have also placed extra guards around the American Embassy following Palestinian commando accusations of US involvement in the Israeli raid last month.

Four Palestinians were detained when they failed to stop at a Lebanese checkpoint there on Monday. Judicial sources said a detonator and wireless equipment was found in their car.

On the same day, the Popular Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PDFLP) issued a statement saying that the authorities had arrested five of its guerrillas in the city even though they were carrying proper identity papers.

Yesterday army units set up checkpoints outside the sprawling refugee. camps loçated off the number of people who have been killed in Glasgow fires to more than 17 this year. Two children died in a ground floor tenement in the Govan area of the city last month.

The • uncle of the five dead children discovered the blaze remained at Shotton and would provide long-term employment for more than 6,000 people.

"To deny this, in my view, causes unnecessary added anxiety to the work force and does a diese vice to the communitis Mele said.

In his reply, Jones said: 1 deeply resent both the implication and your arroKnow better than i what is gant assumption that Knowater good for the people of East Flintshire.' The hard-line attitude of the government and the BSC and Jones's petulant reaction, are yet more indications that there is to be no reformist solution to the jobs crisis in steel.

Jones, his colleagues at Westminster and their friends in the union leaderships must be told to stop pussyfooting around with diversions and get on with the job of removing the Tories who are wielding the jobs axe. BY JOHN SPENCER OUR FOREIGN EDITOR main r sad to Beirut airport, on the so ithern approaches to , the and began checking the of everybody going in and out.

Last month three prominent leaders of the Fatah liberation organization were massacred by Israeli commandos in the Lebanese capital. The Lebanon army did nothing to prevent the shootings.

Though they were well aware of the presence of Israeli troops, the Lebanese forces stood by and allowed the Zionists to go about their murderous work.

This was not the first attack against Palestinian refugees in the Lebanon. When Israeli troops stormed across the frontier into southern Lebanon last year the Lebanese army again offered only token resistance.

Their reaction was to hit back not at the Zionists, but at the Palestinians: the commandos were ordered out of the border area known to the Israelis as 'Fatahland' and stringent restrictions were placed on their right to bear arms.

These restrictions, together with the military inaction, sealed the fate of the murdered leaders. They were not able to defend themselves adequately because their followers were forbidden to carry arms in Beirut.

With yesterday's attack, the Lebanese government is trying to regain a situation of 'peaceful co-existence' with Zionism. This -as the Israeli regime has made clear-can be achieved only over a mountain of Palestinian corpses.

The Lebanese government's continued capitulation to Zionist pressure has ended in a massacre of Palestinian refugees. This will no doubt be hailed by the Zionist Press and the government of Israel as another great victory. when he returned shift.

'All I could see was smoke coming from the windows. I tried to run upstairs, but firemen pulled me back,' he said.

'It was terrible. The children simply could not get out. Men Barry Jones NOONOT SAY - 1 LIONS ry Jones (on right in In reality it demonstrates the counter-revolutionary character of the Lebanese regime, which like all the Arab capitalist classes, is incapable of waging even the most basic struggle for the elementary national rights of their fellow Arabs in Palestine.

Yesterday's fighting is not the first clash between the Palestinian liberation fighters and Lebanese troops. In the summer of 1969 there was widespread fighting between the army and the commandos.

The tense relations erupted again last December when nine men on both sides were killed in skirmishes resulting from an army clampdown which preAll Trades Unions Alliance Public Meetings Glasgow's lethal fires are a result of the appalling tenement housing conditions. If fire breaks out in these huge Victorian stone buildings, it is difficult to escape. Recently slum clearance in Glasgow has fallen because of the Tory Housing Finance Act. vented guerrilla units from entering the battle zone along the Israeli border.

These restrictions were imposed after a large-scale Israeli raid in September last yedt, which devastated much of Southern Lebanon and in which the army lost 19 men.

The conservative army officers, particularly the Maronite Christians, regard any losses as too heavy and are privately willing to come to terms with Israel over the dead bodies of the Palestinians.

Once the commandos' writ ran in large parts of the Southern Lebanon and many quarters of Beirut but it has been steadily whittled away to the areas immediately surrounding the refugee camps. NEWS DESK 01-720 2000