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Huge blaze at Beirut port sparks panic of second explosion

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A military source said early indications suggested the blaze started when cooking oil in the port area caught fire and spread to stores of tires. (AP)
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A Reuters witness saw flames rising up in the devastated port area, although it was not immediately clear what caused the blaze. (Social media)
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Updated 11 September 2020
NAJIA HOUSSARI
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Huge blaze at Beirut port sparks panic of second explosion

  • Lebanese MP, ex-minister blame ‘corruption, neglect, government failures’ for latest fire as probe launched
Updated 11 September 2020
NAJIA HOUSSARI

BEIRUT: A huge blaze in Beirut port on Thursday sparked fresh panic among residents in the Lebanese capital just one month after a massive explosion at the site killed and injured thousands of people.

The fire broke out at 1:30 p.m. in an oil and tire warehouse in the dock’s duty-free market sending plumes of smoke billowing out over the city’s skyline.

Port workers, still recovering from the shock of the Aug. 4 blast which left 192 people dead, fled their offices as emergency crews and the military battled to contain the blaze.

Traumatized Beirut citizens, many of them among the 300,000 displaced by August’s explosion of thousands of tons of poorly stored ammonium nitrate, took to social media as news of the latest fire sent shockwaves of fear through nearby districts.

One poster said: “We can’t handle any more. We just can’t take a break in this country. I’m sorry I wanna leave Lebanon as soon as possible, I can’t stand this anymore.” In a tweet, another resident said: “Enough is enough.”

Streets surrounding the port emptied and workers restoring buildings damaged in the previous inferno quickly evacuated the area as the fire triggered fears of another blast, despite official reassurances that “there was no need to panic.”

For some, the government appeal for calm fell on deaf ears after Lebanon’s Health Minister Hamad Hassan had previously claimed that the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) outbreak in the country was under control before the number of cases rocketed.

Army helicopters joined firefighters and Civil Defense teams in helping to extinguish the fire with crews from outside the capital racing to the scene with extra supplies of water.

Bassem Al-Qaisi, director general of Beirut’s port, said: “The fire was far from the site of the first blast. It took place in an area close to the highway and not near the marine docks.”

Soldiers cleared nearby streets and stopped people from using drones to film the incident so as to allow army choppers to operate safely.

Lebanon’s Minister of Justice Marie-Claude Najm said that the blaze was caused by “welding work taking place near the warehouse. What happened is the result of negligence and inexperience.”

She added that while action would be taken by the Public Prosecution, “unfortunately, what is done is done.”

General prosecutor of the Court of Cassation, Judge Ghassan Oueidat, assigned the military police, army intelligence, and other relevant authorities to launch an investigation into Thursday’s fire.

Director General of Civil Defense Brig. Gen. Raymond Khattar, said: “Highly flammable substances, such as rubber and oils, were burning, and this necessitated taking exceptional measures in handling the situation.”

Former Lebanese minister, Richard Kouyoumjian, said the port fire was the result of “the corruption, negligence, and ignorance of the state’s departments and institutions, not fate. This is also an indication of the failure of the political authority, and we do not have to accept it, but we must change it.”

MP Fadi Karam told Arab News: “What happened today (Thursday) represents the total removal of the government from the positions it maintains through its repressive apparatuses. This government must leave as soon as possible.

“Those who have been put in charge of the country are failures. The Lebanese people are afflicted by their government and not by the events taking place. This authority takes Lebanon hostage and compromises the lives of the people.”

On Tuesday, Judge Fadi Sawan, who is leading investigations into the deadly Aug. 4 port blast, concluded hearing the statements of two witnesses, caretaker minister of public works and transport, Michel Najjar, and general director of state security, Maj. Gen. Tony Saliba.

According to judicial sources, the hearing focused on, “the reasons for the delay in taking the necessary and urgent measures to remove the large amount of ammonium nitrate (2,750 tons) from Hangar 12 before it exploded on Aug. 4 and turned Beirut into a disaster city.”

Sawan was next Monday due to hear the testimony of general security chief, Maj. Gen. Abbas Ibrahim, as well as those of political, security, and judicial officials and port managers. Last week he took evidence from Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Hassan Diab.

Topics: Beirut Lebanon Beirut explosion

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UK signs deals with Iraq aimed at curbing irregular immigration

Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper and Iraq’s Minister of Interior Abdul Amir Al-Shimmari, front right, shake hands.
Updated 28 November 2024
AFP
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UK signs deals with Iraq aimed at curbing irregular immigration

  • “Organized criminals operate across borders, so law enforcement needs to operate across borders too,” Cooper said
  • Pacts include a joint UK-Iraq “statement on border security” committing both countries to work more closely in tackling people smuggling and border security
Updated 28 November 2024
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LONDON: The UK government said Thursday it had struck a “world-first security agreement” and other cooperation deals with Iraq to target people-smuggling gangs and strengthen its border security.
Interior minister Yvette Cooper said the pacts sent “a clear signal to the criminal smuggling gangs that we are determined to work across the globe to go after them.”
They follow a visit this week by Cooper to Iraq and its autonomous Kurdistan region, when she met federal and regional government officials.
“Organized criminals operate across borders, so law enforcement needs to operate across borders too,” she said in a statement.
Cooper noted people-smuggling gangs’ operations “stretch back through Northern France, Germany, across Europe, to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq and beyond.”
“The increasingly global nature of organized immigration crime means that even countries that are thousands of miles apart must work more closely together,” she added.
The pacts include a joint UK-Iraq “statement on border security” committing both countries to work more closely in tackling people smuggling and border security.
The two countries signed another statement on migration to speed up the returns of people who have no right to be in the UK and help reintegration programs to support returnees.
As part of the agreements, London will also provide up to £300,000 ($380,000) for Iraqi law enforcement training in border security.
It will be focused on countering organized immigration crime and narcotics, and increasing the capacity and capability of Iraq’s border enforcement.
The UK has pledged another £200,000 to support projects in the Kurdistan region, “which will enhance capabilities concerning irregular migration and border security, including a new taskforce.”
Other measures within the agreements include a communications campaign “to counter the misinformation and myths that people-smugglers post online.”
Cooper’s interior ministry said collectively they were “the biggest operational package to tackle serious organized crime and people smuggling between the two countries ever.”

Topics: UK Iraq immigration

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Some Lebanon hospitals look set to restart quickly after ceasefire, WHO says

Updated 28 November 2024
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Some Lebanon hospitals look set to restart quickly after ceasefire, WHO says

  • “Probably some of our hospitals will take some time,” Abdinasir Abubakar, WHO representative in Lebanon said
Updated 28 November 2024
Reuters

GENEVA: A World Health Organization official voiced optimism on Thursday that some of the health facilities in Lebanon shuttered during more than a year of conflict would soon be operational again, if the ceasefire holds.
“Probably some of our hospitals will take some time, but some hospitals probably will be able to restart very quickly,” Abdinasir Abubakar, WHO representative in Lebanon, told an online press conference after a damage assessment this week.
“So we are very hopeful,” he added, saying four hospitals in and around Beirut were among those that could restart quickly.

Topics: Battlefield Lebanon Lebanon World Health Organization

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Lebanon says 2 hurt as Israeli troops fire on people returning south after truce with Hezbollah

Updated 28 November 2024
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Lebanon says 2 hurt as Israeli troops fire on people returning south after truce with Hezbollah

  • Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said two people were wounded by Israeli fire in Markaba, close to the border, without providing further details
  • It said Israel fired artillery in three other locations near the border
Updated 28 November 2024
AP

BEIRUT: At least two people were wounded by Israeli fire in southern Lebanon on Thursday, according to state media. The Israeli military said it had fired at people trying to return to certain areas on the second day of a ceasefire with the Hezbollah militant group.
The agreement, brokered by the United States and France, includes an initial two-month ceasefire in which Hezbollah militants are to withdraw north of the Litani River and Israeli forces are to return to their side of the border. The buffer zone would be patrolled by Lebanese troops and UN peacekeepers.
Lebanon’s state-run National News Agency said two people were wounded by Israeli fire in Markaba, close to the border, without providing further details. It said Israel fired artillery in three other locations near the border. There were no immediate reports of casualties.
An Associated Press reporter in northern Israel near the border heard Israeli drones buzzing overhead and the sound of artillery strikes from the Lebanese side.
The Israeli military said in a statement that “several suspects were identified arriving with vehicles to a number of areas in southern Lebanon, breaching the conditions of the ceasefire.” It said troops “opened fire toward them” and would “actively enforce violations of the ceasefire agreement.”
Israeli officials have said forces will be withdrawn gradually as it ensures that the agreement is being enforced. Israel has warned people not to return to areas where troops are deployed, and says it reserves the right to strike Hezbollah if it violates the terms of the truce.
A Lebanese military official said Lebanese troops would gradually deploy in the south as Israeli troops withdraw. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to brief media.
The ceasefire agreement announced late Tuesday ended 14 months of conflict between Israel and Hezbollah that began a day after Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack out of Gaza, when the Lebanese militant group began firing rockets, drones and missiles in solidarity.
Israel retaliated with airstrikes, and the conflict steadily intensified for nearly a year before boiling over into all-out war in mid-September. The war in Gaza is still raging with no end in sight.
More than 3,760 people were killed by Israeli fire in Lebanon during the conflict, many of them civilians, according to Lebanese health officials. The fighting killed more than 70 people in Israel — over half of them civilians — as well as dozens of Israeli soldiers fighting in southern Lebanon.
Some 1.2 million people were displaced in Lebanon, and thousands began streaming back to their homes on Wednesday despite warnings from the Lebanese military and the Israeli army to stay out of certain areas. Some 50,000 people were displaced on the Israeli side, but few have returned and the communities near the northern border are still largely deserted.
In Menara, an Israeli community on the border with views into Lebanon, around three quarters of homes are damaged, some with collapsed roofs and burnt-out interiors. A few residents could be seen gathering their belongings on Thursday before leaving again.

Topics: Battlefield Lebanon Israel Hezbollah Lebanon

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Algeria facing growing calls to release French-Algerian author Boualem Sansal

Updated 28 November 2024
AP
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Algeria facing growing calls to release French-Algerian author Boualem Sansal

  • “The detention without serious grounds of a writer of French nationality is unacceptable,” France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said
  • The European Parliament discussed Algeria’s repression of freedom of speech on Wednesday and called for “his immediate and unconditional release”
Updated 28 November 2024
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PARIS: Politicians, writers and activists have called for the release of French-Algerian writer Boualem Sansal, whose arrest in Algeria is seen as the latest instance of the stifling of creative expression in the military-dominated North African country.
The 75-year-old author, who is an outspoken critic of Islamism and the Algerian regime, has not been heard from by friends, family or his French publisher since leaving Paris for Algiers earlier this month. He has not been seen near his home in his small town, Boumerdes, his neighbors told The Associated Press.
“The detention without serious grounds of a writer of French nationality is unacceptable,” France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said on Wednesday.
He added Sansal’s work “does honor to both his countries and to the values we cherish.”
The European Parliament discussed Algeria’s repression of freedom of speech on Wednesday and called for “his immediate and unconditional release.”
Algerian authorities have not publicly announced charges against Sansal, but the APS state news service said he was arrested at the airport.
Though no longer censored, Sansal’s novels have in the past faced bans in Algeria. A professed admirer of French culture, his writings on Islam’s role in society, authoritarianism, freedom of expression and the civil war that ravaged Algeria throughout the 1990s have won him fans across the ideological spectrum in France, from far-right leader Marine Le Pen to President Emmanuel Macron, who attended his French naturalization ceremony in 2023.
But his work has provoked ire in Algeria, from both authorities and Islamists, who have issued death threats against him in the 1990s and afterward.
Though few garner such international attention, Sansal is among a long list of political prisoners incarcerated in Algeria, where the hopes of a protest movement that led to the ouster of the country’s then-82 year old president have been crushed under President Abdelmadjid Tebboune.
Human rights groups have decried the ongoing repression facing journalists, activists and writers. Amnesty International in September called it a “brutal crackdown on human rights including the rights to freedom of expression, peaceful assembly and association.”
Algerian authorities have in recent months disrupted a book fair in Bejaia and excluded prominent authors from the country’s largest book fair in Algeria has in recent months, including this year’s Goncourt Prize winner Kamel Daoud,
“This tragic news reflects an alarming reality in Algeria, where freedom of expression is no more than a memory in the face of repression, imprisonment and the surveillance of the entire society,” French-Algerian author Kamel Daoud wrote in an editorial signed by more than a dozen authors in Le Point this week.
Sansal has been a polarizing figure in Algeria for holding some pro-Israel views and for likening political Islam to Nazism and totalitarianism in his novels, including “The Oath of the Barbarians” and “2084: The End of the World.”
Despite the controversial subject matter, Sansal had never faced detention. His arrest comes as relations between France and Algeria face newfound strains. France in July backed Morocco’s sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara, angering Algeria, which has long backed the independence Polisario Front and pushed for a referendum to determine the future of the coastal northwest African territory.
“A regime that thinks it has to stop its writers, whatever they think, is certainly a weak regime,” French-Algerian academic Ali Bensaad wrote in a statement posted on Facebook.

Topics: Boualem Sansal Algeria France

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Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer killed in Syria, SNN reports

Updated 28 November 2024
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Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer killed in Syria, SNN reports

Updated 28 November 2024
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DUBAI: Iranian Revolutionary Guards Brig. Gen. Kioumars Pourhashemi was killed in the Syrian province of Aleppo by “terrorists” linked to Israel, Iran’s SNN news agency reported on Thursday without giving further details.
Rebels led by Islamist militant group Hayat Tahrir Al-Sham on Wednesday launched an incursion into a dozen towns and villages in northwest Aleppo province controlled by Syrian President Bashar Assad.

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