Thousands of protesters mark two years since Beirut blast

BEIRUT: Thousands of protesters marched tearfully in the Lebanese capital on Thursday, marking two years since a cataclysmic explosion at the Beirut port, with chants denouncing the government’s failure to uncover the truth behind the blast.

In a grim reminder of the disaster, several grain silos that were left heavily damaged by the blast collapsed on Thursday afternoon, only hundreds of metres away from where crowds were gathering at the city’s waterfront.

The concrete silos cracked and fell, sending a cloud of smoke into the sky. Protesters covered their mouths in disbelief.

“Seeing the smoke coming out – especially that I was here during the blast – triggers a very bad memory. It was the same smoke coming from the silos up to the sky,” said 31-year-old protester Samer al-Khoury.

The protesters, wearing t-shirts stamped with blood-red handprints, were marching from Lebanon’s justice ministry to the city’s waterfront and then to parliament in the centre of Beirut.

The blast flattened swathes of the city on Aug 4, 2020, killing at least 220 people. One of the largest non-nuclear explosions in history, it was caused by massive stores of ammonium nitrate kept at the site in the port and neglected since 2013.

“It’s important for me to be here today because it’s very important for us to ask for justice and accountability for what happened,” said Stephanie Moukheiber, 27, a Lebanese woman living in Canada for the last decade, who decided to spend the summer in Lebanon.

“What happened was not a mistake, it was a massacre. It destroyed an entire city.”

Several senior officials have been accused of responsibility but, to date, none have been held to account - symptomatic, critics say, of a governing elite hamstrung by corruption and on whose watch Lebanon has descended into a political and economic crisis.

Lebanon’s current President Michel Aoun said days after the blast that he had been warned about the chemical stores at the port and asked security chiefs to do what is necessary.