Lebanese direct growing anger at US

"That's how they create terrorists," says Mohammed, a Lebanese restaurant owner, while watching the digging effort in Shiyyah. "And they ask: 'Why do they hate us?' "

As the bulldozers and backhoes moved slabs of smashed concrete, the tines of their buckets biting with determination into the smoking rubble, emergency workers with picks and shovels – and stretchers at the ready – kept a sharp eye for victims.

First one man was found, then a woman. Then a backhoe driver called out through the dust: "Here's another one!"

It was 4-year-old Riham Ramaiti, granddaughter of Said Yatim, who broke down, shaking, at the sight of her.

"No! No!" he cried, shouting prayers as she was bundled up and taken away for washing, and then the afternoon funeral. Riham had been visiting relatives with her father, Ali, an electrician, and mother, Maya, when the building collapsed.

"I don't understand anything! I don't know, I just don't know," wailed Mr. Yatim, his body shaking. "Criminal people and a criminal government does this to us. The kids have nothing to do with missiles and bombs, but they are burning everything. No one in the world deserves such a massacre."

Other anxious relatives clamored nearby, waiting for news; one official in a bright green emergency vest carried a list of names, crossing out one after another throughout the grim task.

"Americans, Europeans, and the Western people are great people ... they love freedom," says Yatim, as workers sought to find his daughter. "But the governments of Bush and [British Prime Minister Tony] Blair are criminal."

Yatim's wife Alia arrived, wearing a black head scarf, her face twisted with emotion.

"I saw Riham," Yatim reported to her. "She looked the same, nothing changed. She's an angel."

The search continued. More were found. An emergency worker discovered a large chunk of shrapnel, a foot long and very heavy, with sharp serrated edges designed to destroy buildings.

"We never thought we would see this in Lebanon again," says Alia, who survived the 1975-90 civil war.

"Imagine if Americans were receiving this, and not Lebanese," says Yatim. "If these were Americans dying in this massacre, what would they think?

"We are in the 21st century, and it's unbelievable we still have people who follow such a savage way," he continues. "There are 1,000 ways, democratic ways, that [Americans] can protect the world – not this way."

Then he broke away, as a bucket of rubble was emptied on a collapsed roof. "There is Riham's toy!" Yatim tells his wife. A moment later, it was covered by another bucketful.

"Will your words and photographs go out? They won't stop you?" Yatim asks a visiting reporter, his voice at once broken, and tinged with challenge. "We don't trust the world anymore."

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