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Special report: Addressing Lebanese port officials, sources, firefighters and eyewitnesses and reviewing a dozen documents, Bel Trew, Oliver Carroll, Samira el-Azar and Richard Hall hint at the written record of the negligence and incompetence that led to the devastating explosion.
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Residents in downtown Beirut wondered a fungus over their heads as the sky cracked and a wave of tension erupted.
It’s as if the sound itself imploded everyone’s ears. The global has been damaged and closed. The bodies were lifted up in the air and thrown through rooms and streets. The facades of apartment buildings, offices and hospitals were taken off and crushed.
The explosion caused tornadoes of war tension that ripped everything from walls and floors, throwing shrapnel through the air like bullets. The force of the explosion shattered the windows, crashed buildings, wrinkled metal shutters and cars crushed like a giant’s fist.
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“It’s like an atomic bomb,” says Hala Okeili, 33, a yoga instructor who was less than a mile from the port when the crisis occurred. “I think they had started a war and someone bombed us.”
The explosion, which affected the Lebanese capital around 6:08 p.m. On Tuesday, it’s one of the biggest non-nuclear explosions in fashion history. He killed at least 210 other people and wounded another 6,000. There are still dozens to go.
Investigations into what happened and who is guilty of it are ongoing: the initial investigation indicates that nearly 3,000 tons of explosive ammonium nitrate stored dangerously on fire.
A review of a dozen documents, as well as interviews with Lebanese port officials, government sources, firefighters and eyewitnesses, showed enormous incompetence in the seven years before the explosion and the last thirteen minutes before the destruction of the city.
Since 2014, the government had warned so much about the harmful nature of the fabrics stored in the port that it was not unusual to avoid hangar 12, where ammonium nitrate was stored. Port officials may even have left the site before they can also inform the former in responding to the nature of the substances.
Firefighters, who were reportedly killed in the explosion, arrived with materials unsuitable to extinguish the fire, which may be with fireworks.
There’s an urgent desire to know why this happened.
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None of the team members aboard the Russian shipment would have guessed seven years ago that their journey, which began in the Black Sea, would end up decimating the Lebanese capital of Beirut at more than 1000 km.
The story began on September 23, 2013. The Rhosus, a 27-year-old cargo ship, left the Georgian port of Batumi with a shipment of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate, an explosive substance used in fertilizers and bombs.
The shipment never intended to dock in Beirut. A contact record provided to The Independent shows that the final recipient is an explosives company in Mozambique.
The origins of shipping are unclear, as are many in the global shipping industry. He controlled through a company registered in the Marshall Islands and sailed under the flag of Moldova. He controlled through a small Russian businessman and Cyprus resident, Igor Grechushkin, according to documents reviewed through The Independent.
Russian citizen Boris Prokoshev, however, took over the shipment when he stopped in Tuzla, Turkey.
Problems that are already brewing aboard the ship.
Captain Prokoshev was greeted through a logo of the new Ukrainian team after the first one broke in because they had not been paid for 4 months.
But it was only when the captain, however, met with the owner in Piraeus, Greece, a fuel prevention in October, Prokoshev began to perceive the magnitude of Grechushkin’s monetary problems.
“It’s strange: after signing the materials for the first time, he refused to pay two-thirds of them,” Captain Prokoshev told The Independent. “Then he ordered us to make an additional impediment in Beirut to retrieve some other shipment.”
The Rhosus sailed for Beirut on 15 November and arrived, according to the captain’s estimates, about 4 days later. Precise cases are disputed before landing. According to lawyers acting on behalf of the ship’s creditors, the Rhosus underwent a technique that forced him into port, where he did not pass a protective inspection.
But Captain Prokoshev told The Independent that he was able to dock in Beirut to bring an additional load of heavy road equipment, which he finally made the decision that it may not be stored safely on board. After an “animated” discussion with Mr. Grechushkin, the captain entered Larnaca in Cyprus.
But at this point, the Lebanese port demanded unpaid fines and shipping fees and refused to let them go. In Captain Prokoshev’s account, Grechushkin took the decision to “abandon” the shipment and its 10 crew members to his fate. In late November, the Lebanese government seized the ship.
The team temporarily ran out of supplies. “Without our agent in Beirut, we would have starved to death,” Captain Prokoshev told The Independent.
After months of fierce attacks through Ukrainian diplomats, most of Rhosus’s team were allowed to return home in early 2014. But Captain Prokoshev and a small staff were held hostage by the Lebanese government while they knew what to do with the ship. .
The captain was even forced to sell the fuel to pay the lawyers, who called for the release of the team for “humanitarian reasons.” A Lebanese court despite everything agreed, but only after contemplating the “imminent danger facing the team given the nature of the cargo”.
At the time of his release, the team owed more than $240,000 (190,600 euros) in unpaid wages.
The Lebanese government knew from the beginning how volatile shipping was. The next six years were marked by warnings that could have prevented the crisis if they had been carried out. Instead, a poisonous combination of corruption and mismanagement in all public establishments in Lebanon has paved the way for tragedy.
The first warning issued even before the shipment was downloaded to an internal note dated February 2014 and notified through The Independent.
In the document, Colonel Joseph Skaf, head of Lebanon’s Narcotics Control Division, warned the service against beirut smuggling that the curtains “were extremely damaging and threatened public security.”
Baroudi – Associates, representing the Russian ship’s team, would have sent letters in July 2014 to the port of Beirut and the Ministry of Transport “to warn them of the risks of the fabrics transported on the ship.”
Finally, shortly after the team left Lebanon, the harmful shipment was transferred to warehouse number 12.
The Rhosus, a team or owner, would remain on Beirut’s docks before sinking “two or three years later.”
For Prokoshev, it was the end of a nightmare and an occasion he had kept in his brain for a long time until the news of the explosion was known last week. For the citizens of Beirut, this would mark the beginning of their own.
Six years later, it is not uncommon for Hangar 12 port employees at Beirut port to be “dangerous,” The Independent told The Independent.
Not everyone knew exactly what was inside. The base believed it was housing confiscated weapons. People have avoided it.
At the official point, the contents of the shed are well known. In fact, inventory considerations have been raised at least 8 times since 2014, according to documents reported through The Independent and interviews with officials.
Fireworks were even moved to the hangar, despite the dangers, according to a port source.
In a letter dated May 20, 2016, the head of the customs service at the time, Shafik Merhi, wrote to a judgment of the Urgent Affairs Court requesting permission to sell or export the harmful inventory to a Lebanese company. He said he was jeopardizing port and worker protection.
A year later, in a letter of 28 October 2017 addressed to the court, Badri Daher, the new head of the customs service, repeats the plea.
In the statement, notified through The Independent, he wrote that he follows the letters sent in 2014, 2015, twice in 2016 and earlier in 2017. Shortly before his arrest. Daher, who is one of more than a dozen port officials who are lately under investigation, said he had not won any proper command on what to do.
In December 2019, state security requested an investigation into the hazardous ingredients in Hangar 12 and concluded its findings in January. They informed the Presidency and the Prime Minister a few months later.
President Michel Aoun admitted that nearly three weeks before the explosion, on 20 June, he had won this report and informed him that the dangerous had been there for seven years.
He said he ordered the army and security officers to “do the right thing.”
Mr. Diab, whose government resigned on Monday, won the same letter on the same day and sent it to the Supreme Defense Council for recommendation within 48 hours.
But nothing has been done.
The factor even increased just 11 days before the explosion when the Minister of Public Works, Michel Najjar, told Al Jazeera that he had been informed for the first time of the harmful reserve.
Due to a new blockade of the coronavirus in his position at the time, Najjar said there was a brief delay and spoke to the port’s general manager, Hassan Koraytem, about the factor on Monday, 24 hours before the explosion.
The port administrator said he would send all the relevant documentation so everyone could take a look at it. But it’s too late.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, August 4, port electrician Joe Akiki, 23, called his mother to tell him the night shift was beginning.
Most port workers prevent at four o’clock in the afternoon. Every day. And so, there were few other people on the floor when, a few hours later, a chimney exploded.
Shortly before 6 p.m. local time, Joe is on the roof of a building that is part of Beirut’s grain silo. He began filming black smoke from Warehouse 12, about 40 yards in front of him.
In the clip, the camera moves from left to right through the broken hangar. Weak sirens, belonging to incoming firefighters, can be heard in the background.
At approximately 5.55pm, a member of the chimney location department’s operating room, just east of the port, won a call from the Beirut Police Department saying there was a chimney spot in one of the warehouses.
Chimneys in ports are not uncommon, he told The Independent. But the way he reported and dealt with was unusual. The chimney branch worker who won the call said no one talked about ammonium nitrate or explained which hangar was affected.
A team of 10 other people, nine firefighters and paramedics, were sent to the site and arrived just two minutes later.
There, exceptionally, there was no port equipment to greet them, show them the site and give them the key. It takes them a little while to get to the fire site.
Firefighters told The Independent that if they had known the contents of the warehouse, its location or even if they had earned a key, they would have had more time to assess the danger and contents of the hanger, in all likelihood extinguishing the initial fire, ordering an evacuation. or just get to safety.
Instead, firefighters wasted valuable minutes that may have stored lives, their lives, seeking to locate and break into the warehouse.
“Every minute counts in our work. If they had more information,” said chimney leader Fadi Mazboudi.
At one point, an unknown person, an employee of the port, begins filming in precisely the same position Joe is. The clip shared online and verified through Bellingcat shows the thickening of smoke in a deep carbon. You can hear the crackling of dozens of what appear to be fireworks, bursting in time with bright white and red sparks.
The filming user begins to retreat from the chimney as it develops. A guy screams when an explosion brings them up on the roof.
Across town, just before 6 p.m., the initial explosion was heard through many locals who used social media to tweet images of the smoke column that emerged into the sky.
As the minutes go by, more and more people leave their homes, businesses and outlets or search through the window to find out what’s going on.
Just six hundred metres south of Warehouse 12, Cherine el-Zein, an in-house designer and activist, began filming the cloud over the harbor and told others to close doors and windows due to smoke.
A few minutes down Armenia Street on her right, Carmen Khoury, 46, administrator of the university, stops buying water and leaves the store, with a woman she does not know, to search for fighter jets.
Back at Hanger 12, Sahar Fares, 27, the female doctor accompanying the firefighters has already filmed herself.
From the photographs, transmitted through the BBC and verified through The Independent, it is imaginable to geolocate him in a domain just below where Joe was in the most sensitive state of the grain silo.
His video shows the warehouse on fire, with his uniform colleagues watching the building on fire. She sent the clip to her fiancé Gilbert Karaan at 6:03 p.m., according to Mazboudi. Concerned, Gilbert talks to her on the phone to pressure her to leave. He is on guard when, disoriented, she begins to run towards the grain silo.
A minute later, at 6:04 p.m., Joe, possibly scared and confused, sends his explanation of the three-second clip to an argument by the WhatsApp organization: the last time his friends would hear him.
At this point, firefighters realize the enormity of the scenario in which they have blinds. The fireplace is much larger than they had anticipated.
And so, a few seconds before 6:08 p.m., firefighters Elia Khizami and Charbel Karam call their superiors for quick reinforcements. They warn that they only have “three tons of water,” which is not enough for such a large fire.
But before single equipment can be combined in the chimney branch, hangar 12 explodes.
Sahar is on the phone with her fiancé and runs to protect herself when the line is cut.
The sky above him implodes in a bright, undulating roar of orange and deep red, triggering a ring of white tension that eats everything in its path.
The chimney branch worker who took the original phone call is thrown from the air into his shattered office.
For Carmen, a few hundred yards from the epicentre, it seems that hell has gone wild.
“An iron rod bent over and made me fall. I got stuck under a car, with the woman by my side bleeding,” she says, describing the horrible moment.
“I’ve been two wars and I’ve never experienced such an explosion. For a second, I think the global had come to an end.
For almost a minute, everything on Armenian Street is silent, in a kind of acute inhalation before the pain increases.
The video of Cherine el-Zein, which captures the moment, is black, the sound that is heard is the hissing of gases and the persistent bleating of car alarms.
When other people regain consciousness, the screams begin. The sirens are starting.
“What just happened? My daughter is the store, my daughter is the store,” shouts a desperate guy. In the distance, a woguy says something incomprehensible and moans gently.
In Beirut, blood-soaked bodies stagger through dust and smoke, crystals and disorder. Many if the war has begun.
Hala Okeili, who arrives on Armenia Street in her car, says everything was destroyed immediately.
“Our neighbors, faces I recognized. Other young people bleed for each and every component of their bodies.”
Citizens are starting to make frantic phone calls to the circle of family members throughout the city. People say they’ve had an hour of memory loss.
Medical staff at the nearest hospital, St George, which was emptied due to the explosion, is forced to pull their own colleagues and patients from under the fallen masonry. With the emergency room destroyed, the damaged generator and structurally defective construction parts begin to treat the newly injured in the parking lot with the softness of their cell phones.
Citizens on motorcycles began transporting the wounded to the surprise of projectiles, many of which were repaired through aspirants, to hospitals outside the city, such as those near downtown Beirut each capacity.
At the port, the explosion dug a 43-metre-deep crater, shot down cruisers like stranded whales, destroyed part of Lebanon’s main grain silo, and left only the rickety shores of the warehouses.
A few days later, rescuers issued cuts in the percentages of probability of locating survivors. Angry families gather at the site to ask bulldozers to check under warehouses in case they become an underground network of tunnels and tents.
The bodies of Sahar, Joe and Elia are discovered successively among the rubble, many of them incinerated and in pieces. But the rest of the team, Charbel, is still missing.
Shortly after the explosion, the devastated streets of Beirut began to boil with rage. Protesters armed with ropes call for responsibility and assistance from their government, whose officials are unfortunately absent in the rescue and cleanup operation carried out through volunteers.
Among the crowd are Carmen and Cherine, who protest despite their hospitalization. The unidentified woman trapped under the car with Carmen doesn’t.
A country’s pain turns into a furore.
“There is no single death form that they haven’t used with us,” says Sara Assaf, a Lebanese activist at a rally. She says it was not an accident, but the result of years of endemic corruption in all grades of public life through the country’s leaders.
“They killed us financially. They killed us financially. They killed us physically. They killed us morally. They chemically killed us.
Since the explosion, everyone’s passed the ball. President Aoun insisted Friday that he is not responsible, saying he did not know where ammonium nitrate or the “danger level” Array was
Port officials, prior to his arrest, had expressed similar sentiments, saying they had warned the courts that they had done nothing. Najjar told Al-Jazeera that “no minister knows what’s in the hangars or containers, and it’s not my job to know that.”
Prime Minister Hassan Diab, in his resignation speech on Monday, accused the political elite and their predecessors of hiding the government for seven years.
The apparent query is why nothing is done at any time.
Many even have the small gesture that has been made: the letters written through the officials of the port.
A document submitted to The Independent, dated June 2014 even before the shipment was downloaded, shows a court ruling ruling to port officials that its court had no jurisdiction to authorize the sale of the shipment or its contents.
According to investigative journalist Riad Kobeissi, this shows that all of the following letters were completely useless, because the court may simply not authorize what customs officials ultimately asked for: reselling or reimporting the ammonium nitrate inventory.
“Why keep writing the same letter over and over again? Why didn’t they move on to the security forces or the higher grades in the lobby all those years later?” he asks.
The Independent spoke to port officials, but refused to communicate. The Prime Minister’s Office responded to a request for comment.
Security forces at the pace of the rescue effort directed The Independent to the confidential investigation team that did speak to the media. The merry-go-round continues.
And while the government continues to point the finger and deflect blame, other bodies are unearthed. Many of them are lifeguards.
“I’m numb, a lost ship, I couldn’t cry,” says a fellow firefighter, and describes how he lost 10 of his friends in that hangar on Tuesday. A team he calls family.
“These are national heroes and were sent to their certain death. We’ve lost everything. We’ll make them pay.”
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