Thirteen months later, the explosion that devastated the port of Beirut remains an unpunished massacre that continues to claim victims. Yesterday, local media broke the news of the death of Ibrahim Harb, 35, who had just been taken home by his family after months in hospital entering and exiting a coma. The deep wound to the head, however, left him no way out, forcing him to surrender. With Ibrahim, the death toll rises to 215.
In the months that the boy has spent struggling between life and death, no one has yet paid for the explosion which, since 4 August 2020, has killed over 200 people and injured thousands, forever disfiguring the face of Beirut and triggering the country. an unprecedented economic crisis. Simultaneously with the news of the death, it became known that the Lebanese authorities have decided to once again suspend the investigation of those responsible for the massacre, after receiving repeated pressure from some prominent government officials.
Obstacles to investigations
A few days ago the former Minister of the Interior Nouhad Machnouk and the former Minister of Public Works Youssef Finianos accused the judge in charge Tarek Bitar of bias and misconduct. The day before yesterday, the blockade of the investigation for the second time since the beginning. Last February it was the turn of Judge Fadi Sawan, relieved of office following a ruling by the Lebanese Court of Cassation. The accusation was that of being influenced by the political currents present in the Lebanese Supreme Court, responsible for his appointment. In the ruling that upheld the request, the Supreme Court judges argue that Sawan could not be impartial, as he resided in one of the buildings badly damaged by the blast.
Ibrahim Harb’s relatives during the funeral held yesterday in Beirut
Now, a similar fate could befall Bitar. In recent months, the judge had tried to drag former Prime Minister Hassan Diab to court, along with other ministers, but each of them escaped the judiciary benefiting from the parliamentary immunity they still enjoy and which has never been revoked. despite numerous appeals from the judiciary and civil society.
In response to repeated attempts to obstruct the judicial process Lynn Maalouf, Amnesty International’s deputy international director for the Middle East and North Africa, said: “This decision is just the latest proof that political power has always had all the interest in blocking investigations “.
Amnesty’s convictions were joined by the indignation of civil rights organizations and the families of the victims, who denounced yet another episode of obstruction by the country’s corrupt politics. “Every step of the process was hampered by attempts to cover up the investigation and protect those responsible,” continued Maalouf.
The investigation into MV Rhosus
Parallel to the investigations on the politicians responsible for the explosion, another point on which still lacks clarity concerns the ownership of the MV Rhosus, the abandoned ship in the port of Beirut with a cargo of over 2,500 tons of ammonium nitrate, responsible for the explosion. In this regard, the information platform Daraj recently published an investigation by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, an independent network of investigative journalists active in the areas of the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Near East.
The OCCRP investigation has reconstructed the network of companies and personal relationships that descend from Savaro Ltd, the Dnipro company to which the cargo that, departed from the coast of Georgia, was supposed to reach an explosive materials factory in Mozambique in the 2013. The owner of the company is the Ukrainian Volodymyr Verbonol, to which a second company in London, bearing the same name, is connected. Savaro would be the actor at the top of a dense network of puppet companies, many of which operate in different countries and under the supervision of Mykola Aliseyenko, a relative of Verbonol and a construction magnate. The network has been trading fertilizers with Africa for almost twenty years, a period of time in which it has been assumed that at least three other shipments similar to that of Rhosus have passed through Lebanon.
The investigation also reveals repeated attempts to obscure the command line behind Savaro, defined as “a deliberate attempt to circumvent all responsibility, facilitating criminal practices or other dishonest business.” The hedging took place at the hands of two offshore companies in business with some important subjects of the former Soviet republics – the Cirpiota Interstatus and the English Alpha & Omega, previously under the attention of the British authorities for hypothesis of money laundering. Rhosus’ cargo was purchased by the homonymous company based in London and by a second party, Agroblend Exports Ltd. which is listed as registered in the British Virgin Islands. By doing so, the ownership of Savaro and the name of Verbonol would be systematically obscured by the great operational discretion that the Caribbean islands allow to entrepreneurs who decide to pay taxes on their territory.
On what is the reason why the ownership of Rhosus has tried to have its ship appear as “inactive”, without touching the chemically unstable cargo inside it, OCRP tries to provide additional elements to an argument already on the table . The true destination of the ammonium nitrate cargo would be Syria. The Lebanese journalist Feras Hatoum, discovered a connection line between the satellite companies of Savaro and Geroge Haswani, an entrepreneur close to the Assad regime, and the brothers Imad and Mudalal Khouri, described as liaison agents between the government of Damascus and that of Vladimir Putin in Moscow. Haswani-owned construction company Hesco has the same London address as Savaro. All the figures mentioned had already been sanctioned by the United States for supporting the Assad government. Mudalal Khuri was already known in the news for having negotiated ammonium nitrate on behalf of Damascus in 2013, exactly when the Rhosus docked in Beirut.