Massive blast hits key port in southern Iran
A massive explosion and fire at Iran’s largest commercial port in southern country has killed at least five people and injured more than 500 others.
Social media videos showed black billowing smoke after the blast at the Shahid Rajaei port in Hormozgan Province. Others showed glass blown out of buildings kilometers away from the epicenter of the explosion. State media footage showed the injured crowding into at least one hospital, with ambulances arriving as medics rushed one person by on a stretcher.
The blast shattered windows within a radius of several kilometers and was heard in Qeshm, an island 26 kilometers south of the port.
At least 516 have been injured in the blast at the port just outside of Bandar Abbas, a major facility for container shipments for Iran that handles some 80 million tons of goods a year.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian expressed sympathy for the victims of the deadly blast, adding he had “issued an order to investigate the situation and the causes”, dispatching Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni to the area to look into the incident.
The Interior Ministry said it launched an investigation into the incident.
Although the cause of the blast was not immediately clear, the customs office at the port said in a statement carried by state TV that it probably resulted from a fire that broke out at the hazmat and chemical materials storage depot.
Hossein Zafari, a spokesperson for Iran’s crisis management organization, appeared to blame the explosion on poor storage of chemicals in containers at Shahid Rajaei.
“The cause of the explosion was the chemicals inside the containers,” he told Iran’s ILNA news agency.
“Previously, the Director General of Crisis Management had given warnings to this port during their visits and had pointed out the possibility of danger,” Zafari said.
An Iranian government spokesperson, however, said that although chemicals had likely caused the blast, it was not yet possible to determine the exact reason.
Oil facilities were not affected by the blast on Saturday, authorities said. The National Iranian Petroleum Refining and Distribution Company said in a statement that it had “no connection to refineries, fuel tanks, distribution complexes and oil pipelines.”
Shahid Rajaee, more than 1,000 kilometers south of the capital Tehran, is the most advanced container port in Iran.
The rare explosion came several months after one of Iran’s deadliest work accidents in years. The coal mine blast in September, caused by a gas leak, killed more than 50 people in Tabas in Iran’s east.