For hundreds of thousands in Beirut, the wreckage caused by Tuesday’s colossal explosion came as a shock that will take some time to process.
For the crew of a Russian-owned vessel abandoned in the docks in late 2013, it likely came as less of a surprise.
On Tuesday evening, local media reported the blast was caused by the explosion of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate originating in the Rhosus cargo ship.
The Rhosus sailed under a Moldovan flag but was reportedly owned by Igor Grechushkin, a native of Khabarovsk in Russia’s Far East, and was manned by a crew of Russians and Ukrainians.
According to contemporary reports, the Rhosus was scheduled to transport a cargo of ammonium nitrate from the Georgian port of Batumi to Biera in Mozambique in late 2013. But along the way it fell into technical problems, and failed a safety inspection in Beirut. The ship was later seized after its owner apparently ran out of money.
In 2014, with his crew essentially hostages and running out of provisions, Captain Boris Prokoshev warned of the dangers of his cargo.
“We’ve been here since 3 October 2013,” he told a journalist of the Ukrainian Sailor newspaper. “The cargo in the holds is ammonium nitrate, an explosive substance. We’ve been abandoned, living with no wage on a powder keg for the last 10 months.”
A Russian newspaper that reported on the situation carried a headline that reads especially eerily today: “Crew of the Rhosus cargo ship hostages aboard a floating bomb.”
According to Captain Prokoshev, the owner of the vessel went missing after owing the crew upwards of US 200,000 dollars in wages. Social media posts about the reported owner, Mr Grechushkin, and his company, Teto Shipping Ltd, suggest such claims were not unique.
Natalya Klamm, director of the Odessa-based Assol foundation, which assisted the sailors at the time, told The Independent the situation the men found themselves in was not unique.
“Ships get seized, wages aren’t paid, crews are arrested, people go missing,” she said. “We get calls like this every day. Yes, people were happy when they were eventually released, but it was six years ago and frankly it wasn’t so unusual to remember an awful lot about it.”
Following representations by Ukrainian diplomats, local authorities agreed to release five of the sailors. The Russian captain and three senior Ukrainian crewmen stayed onboard — and would only be allowed to travel home months later.
Around this time, the ship’s dangerous cargo was transferred for “safekeeping” in the Beirut port’s warehouse number 12. The transfer is documented in an article written by two lawyers in Arrest News in October 2015.
Documents leaked on Wednesday morning, which purport to be letters from customs officials to an unnamed judge over 2014-2017, suggest Lebanese authorities were aware about ”serious dangers” connected with the cargo.
Lebanon President Michel Aoun called the failure to deal with the stockpile of ammonium nitrate “unacceptable” and said those responsible would face the “harshest punishment”.
An investigation has now been launched with the committee tasked with presenting their findings in five days.
Early reports suggest the explosion followed repair work to the warehouse, sparks from which caused unidentified pellets to explode, and following that, the ammonium nitrate.
