JERUSALEM (Reuters) – The explosion of the port of Beirut was preceded by a series of explosions, the last of which was a burning of fireworks that apparently set a warehouse full of ammonium nitrate, an Israeli seismological and ammunition expert said on Thursday.
Boaz Hayoun, of the Tamar Group of Israel and an expert on Israel’s seismological and ammunition, looks near his car before an interview with Reuters in Herzliya, Israel August 13, 2020. REUTERS / Amir Cohen
Six explosions prior to the main explosion were split at 11-second intervals, Boaz Hayoun of Israel’s Tamar Group told Reuters.
Hayoun, a former Israeli military engineering officer whose current roles include overseeing safety standards for the use of explosives in Israel, said the six previous firefighters were followed by a seismological sensor array about 70 km (43 miles) ahead the coast of Lebanon was installed by the international geological project IRIS.
“I can not say categorically what caused this, but I can say that these explosions were at the same location,” Hayoun told Reuters.
IRIS could not be immediately reached for comment.
Lebanese officials have blamed the August 4 blast, which killed at least 172 people and left much of the capital in ruins, on an enormous supply of ammonium nitrate that caught fire after being unsafe in the harbor for years. were stored.
President Michel Aoun has said investigators will also investigate the possibility of ‘external interference’ such as a bomb, and negligence such as an accident as causes.
The first five explosions, each of a scale consistent with several tons of explosives that went off, may have taken place underground and gone unnoticed by Beirut witnesses, Hayoun said.
Another indication of underground explosions, he said, was the depth of 43 meters (yard) of the crater near the port, which, allegedly, could not be made by the explosion of the amount of ammonium nitrate reported by Lebanese authorities.
“It would have been shallow, up to 25 or 30 feet,” Hayoun said.
The sixth explosion, he said, was larger than the previous five and consistent with a fire observed near the ammonium nitrate warehouse. Television footage of that fire, Hayoun said, convinced him that it was ‘inadvertently’ caused by the burning of fireworks – and that this would have been enough to turn off the ammonium nitrate in turn.
A Lebanese security source said authorities would not comment on the cause of the disaster until the official investigation was completed.
Israel Defense, a leading private online journal closely associated with the Israeli military establishment, described the sequence as consistent with accidentally dropping ammunition, as as sabotage.
Such a sequence could be consistent with “weapon systems activated in a chain” that may have been stored in the harbor and detonated accidentally, or deliberately started in a sabotage operation, said Israel Defense, which first Hayoun’s findings reported. However, it provided no evidence to suggest that sabotage had taken place.
Speaking to Reuters on Thursday, Hayoun refused to be pulled further, noting that he did not have access to Beirut’s Blast site. Israel and Lebanon are technically at war.
Written by Dan Williams; Edited by Jon Boyle
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