⁍ Boris Prokoshev was captain of the Rhosus in 2013 when he says the owner told him to make an unscheduled stop in Lebanon to pick up extra cargo.

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⁍ Prokoshev said the ship was carrying 2,750 tonnes of a highly combustible chemical from Georgia to Mozambique.

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⁍ The crew were asked to load some heavy road equipment and take it to Jordan’s Port of Aqaba before resuming their journey onto Africa.

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– “They were being greedy,” Boris Prokoshev tells Reuters of the owners of the cargo ship that exploded in Beirut on Tuesday. Prokoshev, the captain of the Rhosus in 2013, says the ship was carrying 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate from Georgia to Mozambique when the owner ordered it to make an unscheduled stop in Lebanon to pick up more cargo. Prokoshev says he was told to load heavy road equipment and take it to Jordan’s Port of Aqaba, where the ammonium nitrate was to be delivered to an explosives manufacturer. But the ship was never leaving Beirut, having failed to load the additional cargo before becoming embroiled in a lengthy legal dispute over port fees. “It was impossible,” Prokoshev says of trying to load the extra cargo. “It could have ruined the whole ship and I said no.” Instead, the ammonium nitrate was unloaded and put in a dock warehouse, where it caught fire and exploded not far from a residential area of the city. The blast killed 145 people, injured 5,000, flattened buildings, and made more than a quarter of a million people homeless. Initial Lebanese investigations into what happened have pointed to inaction and negligence in the handling of the potentially dangerous chemical. Lebanon’s Cabinet on Wednesday agreed to place all Beirut port officials who have overseen storage and security since 2014 under house arrest, ministerial sources said. The head of Beirut port and the head of customs said that several letters were sent to the judiciary asking for the material to be removed, but no action was taken.