WASHINGTON — Diplomats at the US Embassy in Beirut have started to destroy classified material as a security precaution amid anti-American protests in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa. A State Department status report obtained Monday by The Associated Press said the Beirut embassy had “reviewed its emergency procedures and is beginning to destroy classified holdings." It also said that local Lebanese employees were sent home early due to protests by the militant Shiite group Hezbollah over an anti-Muslim film produced in the US. ‘Stevens was breathing when found' Ambassador Chris Stevens was still breathing when Libyans stumbled across him inside a room in the American Consulate in Benghazi, pulled him out and drove him to a hospital after last week's deadly attack in the eastern Libyan city, witnesses said Monday. Fahd Al-Bakoush, a freelance videographer, was among the Libyan civilians searching through the consulate after gunmen and protesters rampaged through it last Tuesday night. Al-Bakoush said he heard someone call out that he had tripped over a dead body. A group of people gathered as several men pulled the seemingly lifeless form from the room. They saw he was alive and a foreigner, though no one recognized him as Stevens, Al-Bakoush said. He was breathing and his eyelids flickered, he said. “I tested his pulse and he was alive," he said “No doubt. His face was blackened and he was like a paralyzed person." A freelance photographer who was with Al-Bakoush at the scene, Abdel-Qader Fadl, said Stevens was unconscious and “maybe moved his head, but only once." The men carried Stevens to a private car to drive him to the hospital since there was no ambulance, all three witnesses said. – Agencies
