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By Tom Perry

TRIPOLI, Lebanon, June 7 (Reuters) - Lebanese Islamists on Thursday sought the surrender of al Qaeda-inspired militants locked in deadly battles with troops at a Palestinian refugee camp but the group said it would not give itself up.

Two members of Lebanon's Islamic Action Front, which includes Sunni politicians and clerics, went to the Nahr al-Bared camp for talks with Fatah al-Islam's military commander Shahin Shahin, the Front's leader Fathi Yakan said.

"(Fatah al-Islam) have reached a dead end. They can only surrender," Yakan said in the city of Tripoli, just south of Nahr al-Bared. "The only thing that will convince them is sharia (Islamic law), and religious reason."

Yakan, head of the group which is close to Lebanon's opposition, said the delegation had not yet met a negotiator from Fatah al-Islam and did not expect a result immediately.

Another Fatah al-Islam military commander, Abu Hurayra, reiterated the group would not surrender.

"We are with any solution that halts the attacks and the bloodshed... but we will not accept any surrendering of weapons or ourselves," he told Reuters from inside the camp.

Previous efforts by Palestinian leaders to broker a solution have failed to end the fighting, which began on May 20.

DEADLIEST

The battles are Lebanon's deadliest internal violence since the 1975-1990 civil war.

Security sources said a Lebanese soldier was killed on Thursday, bringing to 115 the total death toll, including 47 soldiers and 38 militants. Three soldiers were also wounded.

A bomb exploded in a Christian industrial area north of Beirut on Thursday night, killing one civilian and wounding four, security sources said.

Several explosions have rocked the Beirut area since the fighting began.

Lebanese soldiers and firefighters rushed to the scene of the blast at Zouk. At least one large fire was raging and a building was badly damaged with several cars destroyed.

Earlier in the squalid Nahr al-Bared camp, abandoned by most of its 40,000 residents, soldiers used artillery and machineguns against Fatah al-Islam's positions in sporadic fighting.

A Reuters witness said soldiers took about 20 men, blindfolded and handcuffed, away from the camp's southern entrance. There was no immediate information on their identities.

The army and the government say Fatah al-Islam started the conflict and have repeatedly called for its men to lay down their arms and surrender, demands the group has rejected.

"The blood of the martyred soldiers is a deposit around the neck of the army which will not rest before the criminals are arrested and taken to justice," army commander General Michel Suleiman said at the wake of a fallen soldier.

The authorities charged three more members of Fatah al-Islam with terrorism on Thursday, bringing to 30 the total indicted, judicial sources said. The charges carry the death penalty.

The violence is the latest jolt to stability in Lebanon, already in the midst of a 7-month-old political crisis. (Additional reporting by Nazih Siddiq in Nahr al-Bared)

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