BEIRUT, Sept 6 (Reuters) - A Lebanese prosecutor charged 84 people on Monday over involvement in a Sunni-Shi'ite clash which killed three people in Beirut last month.
If convicted, they could face the death penalty.
The three people who died included a senior member of the Shi'ite group Hezbollah and a supporter of the pro-Syrian Sunni al-Ahbash, during a shootout that lasted four hours and involved machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades on the streets of Burj Abi Haidar, an area of Beirut.
"The military prosecutor Judge Sakr Sakr charged 84 people, 22 of them are already detained, over the Burj Abi Haidar clashes," a judiciary source said.
The source added they were charged with "participation... in killing three people and trying to kill others...damaging some buildings, burning a place of worship and causing sectarian strife".
The clashes on August 24 stirred up political tension between Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri and Hezbollah over the issue of carrying weapons.
Many officials from Hariri's camp demanded the capital be cleared of weapons. Hezbollah, the only group in Lebanon which openly acknowledges possessing weapons -- which it says are for fighting Israel -- considered the calls a provocation.
Hezbollah leader Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah said on Friday that some people had exploited the incident to stir sectarian tension. Without naming Hariri, he accused politicians of putting "salt on the knife, and moving it inside the wound" of last month's violence.
Hariri responded the next day by saying he carried pens and books, not knives.
Sectarian tensions have run high in Lebanon since the assassination in 2005 of former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, father of the current premier and the Sunni's acknowledged national leader.
Last month's clash in Burj Abi Haidar was the most serious sectarian clash in Beirut since 2008, when a political crisis led to a street fight between Hezbollah's powerfully armed supporters and supporters of Saad al-Hariri. Eighty-one people were killed in four days of fighting in the country.
Tension re-ignited last month after Hezbollah strongly criticised a U.N. tribunal investigating Hariri's assassination and said that the prosecutor's first indictment would blame some of its members. Hezbollah denies any link to the 2005 killing.
(Editing by Michael Roddy)
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