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Two powerful explosions, which shook the Lebanese capital Beirut on Tuesday, killed nearly 80 people and injured more than 4,000, the BBC reports.
Lebanese Prime Minister Hassan Diab declared the day of mourning on Wednesday, July 5.
Following the explosions, the exact cause of which is still unknown, the Lebanese media published photos of people trapped in the ruins of the buildings, some of them spilled in blood.
The epicenter of the blast was reported to be a 130m long warehouse in the port area, where, according to the latest reports, ammonium nitrate was considered.
General Abbas Ibrahim, the security chief, confirmed that a warehouse with explosives caught fire and exploded in the city’s port. He said they could have been explosives seized many years ago.
The same was confirmed on television by the country’s Prime Minister: that the “dangerous warehouse” has been in the port since 2014.
Of course, other versions were soon heard, such as that Israel had contributed to the explosion.
At the time, Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi said his country had nothing to do with the explosion in Lebanon, Reuters reported on Israeli television channel N12.
The port is out of service
According to the BBC, the explosion was so great that the port of Beirut was out of place and was a severe blow to a country that imported almost everything it needed.
A former AFP correspondent at the scene said all the shops in the Hamra shopping district were damaged, dozens of shop windows and arches smashed and many cars destroyed. The images show dozens of injured walking through the streets of the city and dozens of bloodied people, including children, were taken to the nearby Clemenceau Medical Center. It was later reported that the city’s hospitals no longer take in all the wounded.
Loud explosions were heard throughout the city, with power outages in some areas.
“The buildings are shaking,” wrote a resident of the capital on the social network Twitter.
“Beirut has just been rocked by a powerful and flaming explosion,” wrote another Twitter user.
Explosions have reportedly been heard even in the Cypriot capital, Nicosia, some 150 miles away.
The Beirut attacks shook the debt of depressed Lebanon in the face of the worst economic crisis since the 1975-1990 civil war, exacerbated by the quarantine measures introduced by the new coronavirus.
The country is also looking forward to a verdict in the case of the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in 2005. Billionaire R. Hariri was killed in an explosion in central Beirut. The court is to announce the verdict on Friday.
Four members of the Lebanese Shiite paramilitary movement Hezbollah are on trial in the Netherlands for a suicide bombing in Beirut that killed a Sunni Hariri and 21 others.
Tensions persist in Lebanon’s relations with Israel, which has announced that it has prevented five Hezbollah fighters from infiltrating into the territory of the Jewish state. The Iranian-backed movement rejected these allegations.
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