⁍ More than 4,000 people were injured in Tuesday’s explosion at Beirut port.
⁍ Officials blamed on a huge stockpile of highly explosive material stored for years in unsafe conditions at the port.
⁍ The blast rattled buildings on the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, about 100 miles (160 km) away.
⁍ President Michel Aoun said 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, used in fertilisers and bombs, had been stored for six years at the port without safety measures.
– “This is the killer blow for Beirut, we are a disaster zone,” one nurse at a Beirut hospital tells Reuters, describing a scene of “blood covering the corridors and the lifts” after an explosion at the city’s port on Tuesday killed at least 113 people and left 250,000 without homes. The government says at least 4,000 were injured in the blast, which it blames on unsafe storage of ammonium nitrate at the port, the AP reports. The country’s president says 2,750 tons of the explosive material had been stored at the port for six years without safety measures after it was seized. President Michel Aoun says the government is “determined to investigate and expose what happened as soon as possible, to hold the responsible and the negligent accountable.” A source familiar with preliminary investigations tells Reuters that “nothing was done” to order the removal of the hazardous material. 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 Red Cross is coordinating with the Health Ministry to set up morgues as hospitals were overwhelmed. Beirut’s Clemenceau Medical Center was “like a slaughterhouse, blood covering the corridors and the lifts,” says one of its nurses.
Source: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lebanon-security-blast/beirut-reels-from-huge-blast-as-death-toll-climbs-to-at-least-113-idUSKCN25107B