Attackers opened fire at a military helicopter as it flew over a Hezbollah-base region in southern Lebanon on Thursday, killing a navigator and forcing the aircraft to make an emergency landing, officials said.
Details about the incident were sketchy and the military sealed off the area, but an army statement said the helicopter was on a training mission when it came under fire from 'armed elements' and was forced down in the highlands of the Iqlim al Tuffah province.
The statement said First Lt. Samer Hanna, a navigator, was killed and that the aircraft was damaged. No one else in the crew was hurt and the army was investigating, it added.
Hezbollah didn't comment on the incident but the militant group has in the past condemned attacks against the military, with which it occasionally coordinates.
Security officials also said that Israeli warplanes flew over south Lebanon villages in surrounding areas of Iqlim al-Tuffah in apparent reconnaissance missions on Thursday, before and after the helicopter attack.
The Israeli overflights are an almost daily occurrence, which Lebanon and the United Nations consider a violation of Lebanese sovereignty.
Thursday's incident occurred outside the zone of operations of UN peacekeepers near the border with Israel, a region patrolled by Lebanese troops and the international peacekeepers.
A top Shiite cleric, Sheik Abdul-Amir Kabalan, urged the army to investigate swiftly and suggested that a collaborator with Israel may have fired on the aircraft.
The area where the incident took place is a predominantly Shiite Muslim, apple-growing region southeast of the southern port city of Sidon, far from LebanonÕs sensitive Syrian and Israeli borders.
But it's also a stronghold of the Shiite Hezbollah militants, believed to have bases and concealed positions there that are off-limits to the general public and media.
There have been no incidents involving Hezbollah guerrillas and the Lebanese troops recently, unlike clashes between the army and Sunni militants in the north, where the military has been targeted.
A bus bombing earlier this month in the northern city of Tripoli killed 18 people, including 10 soldiers. Last month, unknown gunmen attacked a Lebanese military post in remote northeastern Lebanon, killing one soldier and wounding another.
The Al Qaeda-inspired Sunni militant group Fatah Islam claimed responsibility for a bomb that killed a soldier in Abdeh, near Tripoli, on May 31.
In the summer 2007, the Lebanese army drove out Fatah Islam militants from a Palestinian refugee camp, Nahr el-Bared, in a month long battle. The fighting killed hundreds of people and destroyed much of the camp.
Fatah Islam leader Shaker Youssef al-Absi, who is still on the run, warned of vengeance for that defeat in an audiotape recording distributed in January. Al-Absi and four Syrian militants were charged in March for a double bus bombing last year that killed three people.