One year on from the huge explosion in the port of Beirut in Lebanon the devastation from the blast is still visible

At least 200 people were killed, and more than 6,000 injured in the Beirut blast that devastated the port area on 4 August 2020. The explosion is believed to have been caused by an estimated 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate stored in a warehouse.

Away from the broken grain silos, and their rotting contents, Lebanon remains paralysed and anguished. The investigation into the blast has flatlined, and its perpetrators are as far away from accountability as ever. The global aid pledged in the wake of the destruction remains forsaken by the country’s rulers, who prefer the narrow privileges that flowed to them from a crippled system to a global rescue plan that could save the country.

Lebanese capital remains a shell of a city as efforts to find who is to blame for tragedy have made little progress

When his workplace blew to pieces, dockworker Yusuf Shehadi was waiting to hear back from colleagues who had scrambled to help firefighters extinguish a blaze in the port of Beirut. The fire was bad and getting worse, they told him in their last conversation before a giant explosion killed them, and 210 others, a year ago today.

The catastrophic blast laid to ruin the place Shehadi had worked for a decade. And he immediately knew its cause. “I had taken the nitrate from the dock to the hangar six years earlier,” he said of the massive stockpile of military-grade fertiliser that he had helped move from a freighter to a nearby hangar in 2014.