A RUSSIAN businessman who has been accused of abandoning a shipload of explosives that killed 218 people in Beirut has been arrested.
Igor Grechushkin, 48, was detained in Bulgaria after being held on an Interpol Red Notice for his vessel linked to a killer cargo of ammonium nitrate.
Secretive Russian ship owner Igor Grechushkin has been arrested in Bulgaria[/caption]
General cargo ship Rhosus, pictured passing Istanbul[/caption]
The fatal 2020 bomb was allegedly triggered by unsafely stored explosive material and is considered one of the largest non-nuclear blasts in history.
It killed 218 people, left 6,000 injured and 300,000 homeless – as well as inflicting £11 billion in damages on Beirut.
Grechushkin was detained at Sofia International Airport on September 6 as he arrived in Cyprus, but details of his arrest were only made public today.
The Russian-Cypriot businessman “did not resist arrest, cooperated, and nothing suspicious was found in his luggage,” the police chief said.
He was placed in detention for a maximum of 40 days, pending a formal extradition request from Lebanon, they added.
A Lebanese judge also issued an arrest warrant for the ship’s captain, Russian-native Boris Prokoshev through Interpol.
He said: “I believe the arrest measure is unlawful towards both myself and Igor Grechushkin.
“To me, he is guilty in abandoning the ship and in not paying our salaries – but the blame for the Beirut port explosion lies entirely on people who were in charge of the port in Lebanon.
“They simply want to shift the responsibility.”
Grechushkin refused to comment but his wife, Irina, 43, said the family has “suffered enough”.
No Lebanese official has been convicted in connection with the explosion.
The killer cargo of 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate was confiscated in 2014 from the Moldovan-flagged ship Rhosus while en route from Batumi in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia to Mozambique.
Lebanese authorities reportedly deemed the ship not seaworthy and impounded the 40-year-old vessel and its crew of ten sailors.
The crew protested that Grechushkin claimed he had gone bankrupt and had “abandoned the ship” – going on hunger strike before finally being allowed to go ashore.
Grechushkin was said to have paid a “huge penalty” for transporting the cargo which led to him going bust – later moving to Cyprus with his wife Irina.
The blast is thought to have killed 218[/caption]
He lives there with his wife and youngest son Miron in Limassol, a city with an estimated 50,000 expats from Russia.
The Russian captain of the ship Boris Prokoshev, now 70, warned at the time of the deadly nature of the cargo.
He said: “The vessel’s owner abandoned it and we were abandoned too. We were living on a powder keg for ten months without being paid.”
The ammonium nitrate was sold by Georgian fertiliser maker Rustavi Azot LLC, and was to be delivered to a Mozambique explosives maker, Fabrica de Explosivos.
It was however impounded by Lebanese authorities, and sat on the dockside in Warehouse 12 for six years until it blew up.
Reportedly, the blast was sparked when a reckless welder caused a fire at nearby Warehouse 9 – which then spread to the explosive Warehouse 12.
President Michel Aoun said at the time the government was “determined to investigate and expose what happened as soon as possible, to hold the responsible and the negligent accountable”.
Sources close to the investigation blamed the incident on “inaction and negligence”, saying “nothing was done” by committees and judges involved in removing the explosives.
British engineering experts found the blast was “unquestionably” one of the largest non-nuclear explosions ever to take place.
The team from the University of Sheffield calculated the strength of the blast based on the videos and photographs of the catastrophe.
They said the explosion was the equivalent of 1,000 to 1,500 tonnes of TNT.
Beirut was devastated from the explosion in 2020[/caption]
