Lebanon army arrests five suspected of plotting attacks

It said the five men were part of a "terrorist cell" in Qalamoun, near the Mediterranean city of Tripoli. The army was still trying to track down the remaining cell members, it said.

Lebanon has suffered a wave of sectarian violence linked to the conflicts in Syria and Iraq, which are fighting Sunni Muslim insurgencies and have lost control of large tracts of land to a powerful jihadi militant group straddling their joint border.

A suicide bomber blew up his car near an army checkpoint in Beirut on Monday night, killing himself and a security officer, three days after the head of Lebanon's General Security service narrowly escaped a suicide bombing near the Syrian border.

A spokesman for the al Qaeda-linked Abdullah Azzam Brigades said in a statement they were a warning to Lebanon's Shi'ite movement Hezbollah, which is fighting in Syria alongside President Bashar al-Assad's forces.

"We will not let you live in safety until security returns to the people of Syria and Lebanon," he said.

Shortly before Friday's bombing, Lebanese security forces detained 17 people at a Beirut hotel on suspicion of planning attacks in the country.

France's foreign ministry confirmed this week that one of the men had French nationality. Lebanese security sources said a French man of Comorian origin was the only one of the original 17 who was still in detention after the others were released.

(Reporting by Laila Bassam; Writing by Dominic Evans; Editing by Andrew Heavens)