LEBANON) A 14-YEAR-OLD Lebanese boy was shot and fatally wounded after gunmen opened fire on a fishing boat on the maritime border with Syria on Saturday, his father and a local official told AFP.

“My wife crossed the border into Syria and has seen his body in the morgue of Bassel Assad hospital” in the coastal city of Tartus, said Ahmad Hamad of his son Maher.

He said the boy’s uncle, Khaled Hamad was receiving treatment in the same hospital for gunshot wounds and another uncle, Fadi, was being held by Syrian intelligence in the city.

Demonstrators burning tyres sealed off a Syrian border post in northern Lebanon in protest at the incident, an AFP correspondent said.

A local official, Ali Assad Khaled, mayor of the town of Al-Arida, said brothers Fadi and Khaled Hamad and Maher were seized from their boat off the coast of northern Lebanon.

“Gunmen on another boat opened fire on the three Lebanese before seizing them and taking them off to Syria,” he told AFP, adding that the incident was witnessed by other fishermen who insisted it took place in Lebanese waters.

Faced with an anti-regime uprising, the Syrian army in November laced the Lebanese border with landmines in a bid to curb arms smuggling and to hamper army defectors and refugees from fleeing.

Syrian troops have also staged deadly incursions into border villages in neighbouring Lebanon.