The Lebanese Civil Defense reported Thursday that firefighters have extinguished a fire inside the port of Beirut, where on August 4, 2020, an explosion of hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate left more than 200 dead.
«Civil Defense elements extinguished, at 14.45 hours (local time) as of today a fire that broke out inside an abandoned cruise ship in the port of Beirut,» the Lebanese emergency services have indicated on their official Twitter profile.
Another fire broke out the previous day in containers located in the Lebanese port infrastructure, which were controlled by firefighters, although the causes of both fires are unknown at the moment, according to the newspaper ‘L’Orient le Jour’.
The 2020 explosions left more than 200 dead and around 6,500 injured, while displacing some 300,000 people and causing huge material damage in the city, whose port was destroyed, causing the transfer of import operations to the much smaller and less capacious port of Tripoli.
Popular unrest has been on the rise due to the blockage of the investigations into the explosion and the delays in the removal of the immunity of the former ministers and parliamentarians summoned by the Lebanese judiciary to testify in the framework of the investigations.
Added to this, the country is also facing a severe economic crisis that began in 2019 and has been worsened by the prolonged political paralysis and the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, which has led to an increase in poverty.
