On Sunday, the Iranian president visited the people injured in a huge explosion that rocked one of the main ports of the Islamic Republic, an establishment allegedly linked to an earlier delivery of a chemical ingredient used to make a missile propriety.
The visit of President Masoud Pezeshkian came while the death toll of the explosion on Saturday at the port of Shahid Rajaei outside Bandar Abbas in the south of the Iran province of Iran has increased to 40, with around 1,000 other injured.
While the Iranian soldiers sought to deny the delivery of Chinese ammonium perchlorate, new videos emerged showing an apocalyptic scene at the still Smous port.
A crater, which seemed to be depth, was surrounded by smoke that prompted the authorities to close schools and businesses in the region. The containers appeared broken or thrown away, while the carcasses burned of trucks and cars were seated around the site.
“We have to find out why it happened,” Pezeshkian said at a meeting with officials broadcast by Iranian state television.
The authorities described the fire as under control, saying that emergency workers hoped that it would be fully extinguished Sunday later. At night, helicopters and heavy cargo planes stole repeated outings on the fire in fire, pouring sea water on the site. The satellite photos taken Sunday by Planet Labs PBC and analyzed by the Associated Press showed a huge plume of black smoke still on the site.
Provincial governor Mohammad Ashouri gave the last number of deaths, Iranian state television reported. Pir Hossein Kolivand, head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society, said that only 190 of the 1,000 injured remained hospitalized on Sunday, according to a statement made by a website of the Iranian government. The governor said three days of mourning.
Private security company Ambrey said the port had received missile fuel chemicals in March. He was part of an expedition of Chinese ammonium perchlorate by two ships to Iran, reported for the first time in January by the Financial Times. The chemical, used to make a solid propellant for rockets, was going to be used to reconstruct the Iranian missile stocks, which had been exhausted by its direct attacks against Israel during the war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Ships monitoring data analyzed by the AP placed one of the ships that would carry the chemical product nearby in March, as Ambrey said.
“The fire would have been the result of poor management of a solid fuel expedition intended to be used in Iranian ballistic missiles,” said Ambrey.
In a first reaction on Sunday, the spokesperson for the Iranian Defense Ministry, Reza Talaeinik, denied that the missile fuel had been imported into the port.
“No kind of imported deposit and export for fuel or military request was (or) of the port site,” he said on state television by phone. He called foreign relationships on baseless missile fuel, but offered no explanation of which material exploded with such an incredible force on the site. Talaeinik promised that the authorities would offer more information later.
We do not know why Iran would not have moved the chemicals of the port, in particular after the explosion of the port of Beirut in 2020. This explosion, caused by the ignition of hundreds of tonnes of highly explosive ammonium nitrate, killed more than 200 people and injured more than 6,000 others.
However, Israel has targeted Iranian missile sites where Tehran uses industrial mixers to create solid fuel – which potentially means that it had no room for treating the chemical.
Images of the social media of the explosion on Saturday in Shahid Rajaei saw reddish shade rising fire just before detonation. This suggests a chemical compound involved in the explosion, as in Beirut’s explosion.
Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin deployed several emergency planes in Bandar Abbas on Sunday to provide assistance.
