LEBANON - Sept 3 - Lebanese Refugee Camp Falls To Army.

The Lebanese military says it had seized full control of the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp after several hours of intense fighting with the militant Fatah al-Islam group, which had held out against an army siege for more than three months. At least 32 of the armed Islamists were killed and more than a dozen were captured in the fighting which, according to an army spokesman, started when the besieged fighters tried to break out of the camp near the coastal city of Tripoli in the north of Lebanon. Some of the militants are reported to have tried to escape by sea but, according to an army spokesman, they were all killed or captured. The fate of Shaker al-Abssi, the Palestinian leader of the Fatah al-Islam was not clear, although some reports said he managed to escape. His band of militants, which includes fighters from Saudi Arabia, Syria and Lebanon, said it shared the ideology of al-Qaeda but had no organisational links with it. Two soldiers were also reported killed, bringing to 158 the number of Lebanese soldiers killed since the start of the confrontation with the militant group on May 20. In all, some 220 people lost their lives in the fighting. Most of the 30,000 Palestinian inhabitants of the camp had left after the start of the fighting in May, and last week the Lebanese authorities allowed the wives and children of the militants to leave, but they refused passage to wounded fighters from the Islamist group. The fall of the camp to the Lebanese army sparked celebrations in the surrounding villages, with residents thronging the streets, dancing and pouring rice on the troops. The violence at Nahr al-Bared has been the worst in Lebanon since the country's 1975-90 civil war.