Lebanon drawn into Syria conflict after kidnappings In the effort to calm antagonised anti-Assad Sunni Lebanese groups authorities released Shadi Mawlawi, an outspoken critic of Syria's leadership. The cleric had been accused of sparking several days of clashes in northern Lebanon that killed eight people. Violence erupted in Beirut on Monday followed the killing of another anti-Assad Sunni cleric Sheikh Ahmed Abdul-Wahid. Rocket-propelled grenades smashed into buildings and machine guns fire was exchanged between supporting and opposing Damascus groups. The battles increased fears that protracted violence in Syria could drag Lebanon into renewed civil war. Meanwhile, a blast that killed five people in Qaboon neighbourhood of the capital, Damascus on Tuesday, was planted by a militia affiliated with the Free Syrian Army, an activist and resident of the area told The Daily Telegraph. The bomb exploded in or near a restaurant. There were five shabiha [government paramilitaries] closeby so the FSA targeted it," said the activist who asked not to be named. At least 59 people died nationwide on Monday including 31 loyalist troops who were killed in pitched battles with rebel fighters, the British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported. The violence is rendering redundant the UN ceasefire that came into effect on 12 April. Gunfire erupted as a team of UN observers, part of a contingent of 260 unarmed monitors, visited Busayra in Deir Ezzor province in the northeast. Rebels said the police had opened fire on a crowd that had turned out to greet the monitors, leaving two killed. As armed militias proliferate across Syria, other opposition activists are struggling to maintain the fabric of peaceful revolution. "There are two revolutions now," said Nadim Houry, Human Rights Watch's Deputy Director for the Middle East. "The [non-violent] opposition movement Freedom Days is still continuing in Damascus," said Omar al-Khani, Secretary General of the Syrian Revolution Coordinators Union speaking from the capital . But they are struggling to find new ideas. It is harder to move, there are checkpoints on every street here. Peaceful demonstrations broke out at dawn on Tuesday in several neighbourhoods of Aleppo, the country's second city which until recently had been largely spared the unrest shaking the country since March last year.