Another UN success story.
(AP) The bloody conflict in Syria spilled across two borders Monday, killing a cameraman in Lebanon and wounding at least five people in a refugee camp in Turkey as gunfire flew across the tense frontiers, authorities said.
The violence came as a U.N.-brokered peace plan all but collapsed and bolstered fears that the uprising could spark a broader conflagration by sucking in neighboring countries.
Ali Shaaban, a cameraman for the Al Jadeed television station, was filming in Lebanon's northern Wadi Khaled area when a bullet pierced his chest, Lebanese security officials said. The gunfire came from the nearby Syrian village of Armouta, the officials said.
Shaaban, who was born in 1980, died on the way to the hospital, the officials said on condition of anonymity in line with regulations.
His colleague, reporter Hussein Khreis, said the team heard heavy gunfire around them from all sides, "falling like rain." Shaaban was inside a car when he was struck, Khreis said.
"If you see the car you would think it was in a war zone," Khreis said on Al Jadeed TV. "It is completely destroyed from the bullets."
He said they waited for more than two hours for the army and some residents to come and pull them out to safety.
"I ask forgiveness from Ali's family because I couldn't do anything for him," he said, breaking into tears.
Earlier Monday, Syrian forces fired across the border into a refugee camp in Turkey, wounding at least five people, authorities said.
The Syrian soldiers were believed to be firing at rebels who tried to escape to the refugee camp after ambushing a military checkpoint, according to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, citing a network of sources on the ground.
Turkey shelters thousands of refugees who have fled Syria as President Bashar Assad tries to crush a revolt against his regime. The U.N. estimates some 9,000 people have been killed in Syria since March 2011, when the uprising began.
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