Four people were killed in Lebanon’s northern city of Tripoli yesterday in exchanges of fire between neighbourhoods which support rival sides in Syria’s civil war, security and medical sources said.

The dead – including a teenage schoolboy and a man in his 30s – were from the Sunni Muslim Bab al-Tabbaneh district, whose residents overwhelmingly support the Sunni Muslim rebels battling Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Thirty people, including five soldiers, were wounded in the shooting between gunmen in Bab al-Tabbaneh and the adjacent Alawite neighbourhood of Jebel Mohsen, which supports the Alawite Syrian leader.

Yesterday’s fighting followed repeated attacks on Alawites in Tripoli, residents said. Several people were shot and wounded in separate incidents last week, and Alawite men were beaten in an attack on a bus earlier in November.

Lebanon’s caretaker Prime Minister Najib Mikati, a Sunni Muslim from Tripoli, held talks with the interior minister and other security officials in the Mediterranean city to discuss how to end the violence, which erupted despite the deployment of soldiers in both rival districts.

Sniper shots and rocket fire could still be heard in the area at around 2.30 pm, four hours after the fighting broke out, residents said.

Sniper shots and rocket fire could still be heard in the area

The divisions in Tripoli, 30km from the Syrian border, reflect the sectarian gulf across Lebanon over Syria’s civil war. But the northern city, where tensions between the Sunni Muslim majority and small Alawite community have festered for decades, has seen some of the heaviest violence this year.

Two car bombs in August killed 42 people and wounded hundreds at Sunni mosques in Tripoli, just a week after a car bomb in a Shi’ite area of Beirut killed 27 people.

Clashes between fighters in Bab al-Tabbaneh and Jebel Mohsen have flared several times in recent months, killing dozens since the beginning of the year.