It was very shortly after 6pm on August 4th when a huge explosion devastated the port and surrounding city neighbourhood of the Lebanese capital Beirut, killing more than 200 people, wounding more than 6,500 others and leaving an estimated 300,000 inhabitants homeless. It was so powerful it caused ground tremors hundreds of kilometres away, notably in Israel, Syria and Turkey, and even shook the Mediterranean island of Cyprus.
The force of the mega-blast was essentially from the combustion of around 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a chemical compound that had been stored in a warehouse at the port of Beirut for more than six years. it had been seized from a Moldovan flagged cargo ship, the MV Rhosus, in 2013. Why the ammonium nitrate, a substance used for agricultural fertilizer but also for explosives, was allowed to be kept in flagrantly unsafe conditions is still unclear, and no official explanation of the detailed causes of the explosion has been made public.
The tragedy prompted a major political crisis in Lebanon, already gripped by deep economic and social turmoil. Fast-rising poverty, mass unemployment and runaway inflation led to a growing popular revolt, notably mass demonstrations beginning in October 2019, against the country’s sectarian power-sharing political elite, denounced as self-serving and corrupt.
It is within this context, while the exact causes and responsibilities for the August 4th blast remain officially undetermined, that the independent Egyptian online news and investigative media outlet Mada Masr contacted the British research group Forensic Architecture to collaborate on the production of a video using 3D models to reconstruct the precise circumstances and chronology of the events leading up to the explosion.
Forensic Architecture, created in 2010, is led by Eyal Weizman, Professor of Spatial and Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, and brings together experts in a wide range of fields to investigate specific events of public concern, and notably human rights abuse, including by states and corporations, and environmental crimes. Its projects use architectural and spatial analyses, together with expert input, investigative research and open-source data, to produce documented presentations in various formats, like the thoroughly documented and revealing 3D video reconstruction of the events behind the Beirut blast presented here below.
Its findings, what Forensic Architecture calls “multiple layers of state negligence”, are damning for those who allowed what was in effect a vast ticking bomb to decay for years beside volatile goods alongside a densely populated area. To further public use of their research, the Forensic Architecture group have also made available online a digital folder of the modelling, video geolocation details and data sources used in their investigation, and which can be found here.
Click on the screen below to play the video, with commentary in English (subtitled in French):
Meanwhile, an association of more than 1,000 survivors and relatives of victims of the blast, called Victims of the Beirut August Massacre, are demanding an independent international investigation into its causes. It is supported by legal assistance NGO Legal Action Worldwide, which has sent its own report, published on November 13th, to appropriate United Nations officials in which it requests the creation of, “without delay, an independent and impartial fact-finding mission, leveraging global expertise, to establish the facts and circumstances […] with a view to establishing state and individual responsibility and supporting justice for victims”.
It notably demands that “the Government of Lebanon do not destroy or render inaccessible any evidence related to the 4 August 2020 Beirut explosion, and issue clear, public and unequivocal instructions to all government authorities and security forces that all evidence must secured and preserved”.
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- Six other reports resulting from Mediapart's collaboration with Forensic Architecture, beginning in 2018, can be found on this page. Presented in French, the videos are all available in original English commentary (with French subtitles).
If you have information of public interest you would like to pass on to Mediapart for investigation you can contact us at this email address: enquete@mediapart.fr. If you wish to send us documents for our scrutiny via our highly secure platform please go to https://www.frenchleaks.fr/ which is presented in both English and French.
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