Beirut: Two people were killed and 18 were wounded in overnight clashes in Beirut, Lebanon's National News Agency said on Monday.
The clashes were the latest bloodshed fuelled by tensions over the uprising in neighbouring Syria.
The fighting erupted after reports emerged that army troops had shot dead an anti-Syria Sunni cleric when his convoy failed to stop at a checkpoint in north Lebanon on Sunday.
Fighters firing rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns clashed for most of the night in the Tarek A Jadideh district of the Lebanese capital.
The violence followed the killing by Lebanese army soldiers in the north of the country on Sunday of two members of a political party opposed to Syrian President Bashar Al Assad.
The fighting in Beirut raised fears of a repeat of sectarian clashes in 2008 that pitted Sunnis against Shiites and brought the country close to civil war.
The revolt in Syria has excacerbated a deep split between Lebanon's political parties where the opposition backs those leading the revolt against Al Assad while a ruling coalition led by the powerful Shiite Hezbollah supports the regime.
The opposition has accused Al Assad of seeking to sow chaos in Lebanon in order to relieve the pressure on his regime.
More than 12,000 people, the majority of them civilians, have died in Syria since an anti-regime revolt broke out in March last year, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
