#Beirut port officials under house arrest as explosion death toll hits 135
“#Beirut port officials under house arrest as explosion death toll hits 135”
August 5, 2020 | 2:08pm
Smoke rises above wrecked buildings at Beirut’s port.
Getty Images
It was not clear how many officials would be included or their seniority level, official sources told Reuters as they revealed the house arrest under the watch of Lebanon’s army.
Lebanon’s President, Michel Aoun, had earlier warned that those responsible for Tuesday’s horror would face “the harshest punishment.”
He said the government was “determined to investigate and expose what happened as soon as possible, to hold them responsible and the negligent accountable.”
The ammonium nitrate — the highly-combustible material used in terror attacks like Timothy McVeigh’s 1995 bombing that killed 168 in Oklahoma City — had been in a warehouse after being seized from a Russian businessman’s abandoned cargo ship in 2014.
There had been repeated warnings about its dangers — including one just six months ago when inspectors said the seized material could “blow up all of Beirut,” sources told Reuters.
As rescue teams continued to pull out bodies and hunt for the missing, officials revealed that the death toll had reached at least 135 — a figure they expect to continue rising in the coming days, with many still missing.
At least 5,000 people were also injured, and up to 300,000 are feared to have been left homeless.
The explosion was the most powerful ever to rip through Beirut, a city still scarred by civil war that ended three decades ago and reeling from an economic meltdown and a surge in coronavirus infections.
The blast rattled buildings on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, about 100 miles away.
Beirut’s governor, Marwan Abboud, compared the devastation to the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan during World War II.
“In my life, I haven’t seen destruction on this scale,” he said, wiping away tears as he described the “national calamity.”
The government also declared a two-week state of emergency, effectively giving the military full powers during this time.
With Post wires
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