Beirut explosion: was ammonium nitrate destined for Hezbollah?
In September 2013, eight Ukrainians and one Russian boarded the freighter Rhosus , departing from Georgia, presumably to reach Mozambique, where they were supposed to unload 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate. As known, that cargo will never reach its destination, but will land in Beirut, officially due to a technical problem with the ship. In the Lebanese port, the cargo will be crammed into hangar 12 where, unfortunately, seven years later it will blow up, killing at least 182 people, injuring another 6,000 and leaving over 300,000 Lebanese homeless.
Now the Lebanese investigators, supported by French and American colleagues, are trying to understand, among other things, why the ship arrived precisely in Beirut and who was destined for that load of ammonium nitrate, a substance with which fertilizers are produced, but also explosives. A substance widely used over the years by Hezbollah terrorists to carry out (or try to carry out) their attacks all over the world, including Europe.
It is not known to date in which direction the investigations are going, but some important information comes to us from the German newspaper Spiegel , which reports what is emerging from the investigation of a team of international journalists from ten different countries (members of the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project ). According to these journalists, the owner of the cargo is Igor Grechushkin, a Russian businessman who now lives in Cyprus. However, there would be new information, which leads the ownership of the Rohsus to Charalambos Manoli, a Cypriot businessman (Grechushkin would only have rented the boat, flying the Moldavian flag and registered in the Marshall Islands).
Manoli, according to the Helleniscope website , was the real owner of Rhosus , through a company registered in Panama. The company was subsequently registered in Moldova, a country known for the lightness with which it grants so-called flags of convenience to ships. For this second step, Manoli would use a second company he owned, named Geoship . Finally, the ship was also subsequently registered as seaworthy in Georgia, through another company controlled by Manoli. Here the most important step would take place: in the period in which the last trip of the Rhosus was planned , Manoli was in debt with the FBME , a Lebanese bank, known for its role in money laundering, for being linked to Hezbollah and to the weapons of mass destruction program of the Syrian regime of Bashar al Assad.
Finally, according to Helleiscope , the final customer of the ammonium nitrate loaded on the ship was to be an explosives factory in Mozambique (a country where Hezbollah has some of its men). The intermediary of the shipment, a British company, Savaro Limited , allegedly convinced a Lebanese judge in 2015 to test the quality of ammonium nitrate, in order to claim it. The material turned out to be in poor condition and no one insisted on claiming it.
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This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/esplosione-beirut-il-nitrato-di-ammonio-era-destinato-a-hezbollah/ on Wed, 02 Sep 2020 03:59:00 +0000.