Bombers say March 14 funded deadly blast: Syria TV

Syrian state television on Thursday broadcast statements by alleged Fatah al-Islam militants "confessing" to carrying out a suicide car bomb attack that killed 17 people in Damascus in September and claiming they were backed by members of the the Future movement.

The television showed what it said were 12 members of Fatah al-Islam, an al-Qaeda-inspired group that first emerged in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, confessing that they had helped plan the Sept. 27 attack on an intelligence complex.

A woman the station said was Wafa al-Abssi, the daughter of Fatah al-Islam leader Shakr al-Abssi, said that the group had received money from Saad Hariri's Future Movement, which is part of the March 14 coalition that leads Lebanon's anti-Syrian parliamentary majority and is heavily backed by the U.S.

Abdel Baqi Hussein, a Syrian who identified himself as the security coordinator of Fatah al-Islam, said the explosives had been smuggled from Lebanon and the suicide bomber was Abu Aysha al-Saudi -- 'The Saudi'.

"The objective was to rattle the Syrian regime," Hussein said.

"Abu Aysha was smuggled into Syria," Hussein said. "It was him who drove the car packed with explosives and blew himself up in a street in southern Damascus," he said, adding the car was a stolen Iraqi-registered taxi that had operated on the Damascus-Baghdad route.

On Sept. 27, a car bomb exploded near a Shiite shrine in the capital, killing 17 people and wounding 14 others in one of the deadliest attacks in Syria in a dozen years.

The car, packed with 200 kilos (440 pounds) of explosives, blew up near a security checkpoint on a road to Damascus international airport at an intersection leading to the Sayeda Zeinab neighborhood.

All the victims were civilian passers-by.

The men who spoke in the program said they had carried out a series of armed robberies to finance the September attack. They also said they had planned to attack Syrian security posts, British and Italian diplomats and the country's central bank.

The objective was to rattle the Syrian regime

Adbel Baqi Hussein, Fatah al-Islam

Worst blast

September's blast was the worst to rock Syria since February when Hezbollah commander Imad Mughnieh was killed by a car bomb in Damascus.

Since May, Lebanon's northern port city of Tripoli near the Syrian border has also been rocked by deadly sectarian violence between Sunni supporters of the government and their Damascus-backed rivals from the Alawite community.

Lebanon was under Syrian political and military domination for three decades until 2005.

After the assassination in Beirut that year of former premier Rafiq Hariri in a car bombing, Syria was forced to pull its troops out of Lebanon following a 29-year deployment.

It denied any involvement in killing Hariri.

Beirut and Damascus agreed to establish diplomatic relations for the first time at a summit in Paris in July, but although Lebanese President Michel Suleiman visited Syria in September, embassies have yet to be opened.

Last year, the army in Syria's neighbor Lebanon fought a 15-week battle with the al-Qaeda-inspired Fatah al-Islam in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared near Tripoli that left 400 people dead, including 168 soldiers.

However, Fatah al-Islam chief Shaker al-Abssi managed to flee the camp and vowed revenge attacks against the Lebanese army. Before the deadly camp siege in Lebanon Abssi served a prison term in Syria for having links to al-Qaeda.