Episode 2: The Beirut Blast - What Led to the Lebanon Port Explosion?

In August 2020 an explosion tore through the Lebanese capital city of Beirut, killing more than 200 people. In the demand for answers and justice, OCCRP journalists activated their global network to unravel the opaque web of secrecy behind its cause.

In this episode of Dirty Deeds…

How do you begin to investigate the explosion that tore through the Lebanese capital city of Beirut, killing more than 200 people?

In this episode Nick Wallis takes us back to August 2020, talking to OCCRP reporters Rana Sabbagh and Aubrey Belford about how they picked apart the opaque web of secrecy behind the cause of the explosion, scouring the globe from Russia to Mozambique to track down the true owner of the deadly cargo that triggered the devastating blast in Lebanon’s capital.

We also hear from Paul Naggear, who lived and worked less than a kilometer from the blast site at Beirut port. Paul and Tracy’s three-year-old daughter Alexandra died as a result of injuries sustained in the explosion.

Read the investigations:

• A Hidden Tycoon, African Explosives, and a Loan from a Notorious Bank: Questionable Connections Surround Beirut Explosion Shipment
• Ownership of Chemicals that Exploded at Beirut Port Traces Back to Ukraine

Host Nick Wallis talks to…

Rana Sabbagh - @rana_sabbagh

Rana is OCCRP’s senior editor for the Middle East and North Africa, coordinating the investigations that exposed the opaque network of companies and people that allowed the Beirut blast to happen.

Aubrey Belford - @AubreyBelford

Aubrey is OCCRP’s Pacific editor. At the time of the explosion, he was based in Kyiv and played a key role in the Beirut investigations, helping to quickly put together a global team to track down the true cause of the tragedy.

Paul Naggear - @naggearp

Paul and his partner Tracy lived and worked less than a kilometer from the blast site at the Beirut port. Their three-year-old daughter Alexandra died as a result of injuries sustained in the explosion.

Show Notes

• [0:00] - Introduction
• [1:36] - Rana Sabbagh explains background and how the investigation began
• [7:23] - Aubrey Belford explains why he volunteered to join the investigation
• [11:01] - Rana describes the difficulties of reporting in the blast’s aftermath
• [14:36] - Background on Lebanese politics
• [16:41] - How reporters uncovered the opaque network of companies linked to the deadly cargo
• [21:00] - Rana and Aubrey describe the impact of the investigation in Lebanon and the UK
• [23:31] - Paul Naggear recounts the day of the explosion
• [33:02] - Paul describes his campaign for justice

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English Transcript

Click here to read this transcript in Arabic.

Nick Wallis: Hello and welcome to Dirty Deeds Tales of Global Crime and Corruption, a podcast from the global journalism network, the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, or OCCRP as it’s known. In this episode, we’re going to discuss the OCCRP’s investigation into who was responsible for the explosion in the Beirut docks in 2020, which killed more than 200 people and almost destroyed the Lebanese economy. My name is Nick Wallis and I’m a British broadcast journalist. This week I’ll be talking to OCCRP editor Rana Sabbagh about her work on the investigation.

Rana Sabbagh: I nearly had a nervous breakdown because everybody had either lost a family member, a friend.

Nick Wallis: We’ll be joined by Rana’s colleague Aubrey Belford, who discovered that the causes of the explosion went far beyond Lebanon itself.

Aubrey Belford: We put together this team, we had colleagues in Cyprus, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Mozambique, in Lebanon and in Jordan, all working together.

Nick Wallis: And we’ll also speak to Paul Naggear, an engineer living in Beirut, whose three-year-old daughter died as a result of injuries sustained in the blast.

Paul Naggear: Our house was completely destroyed. There was nothing left. I had bleeding from my face and the first thing that I did was to rush to find Tracy and Lexou.

Nick Wallis: We’ll hear more about Paul and Tracy’s campaign for justice a bit later. But first, let’s find out how the OCCRP’s journalists reacted to the blast. I spoke to Rana Al-Sabbah and Aubrey Belford and began by asking Rana where she was when the blast happened.

Rana Sabbagh: I was in Sarajevo where our headquarters are, and the minute the explosion went up, I had a shock that I think I’ve never experienced, even when I was living in Lebanon during the civil war, because I went to university there. The devastation was out of a movie. It was really, really shocking. Then I started calling my family because I have family in Lebanon. Thank God they were all safe because they were outside the perimeter of the explosion, but then I started checking on my friends who lived nearby the port and in Hamra.

And this is when I nearly had a nervous breakdown because everybody had either lost a family member, a friend, or had to take someone to hospital. Hospitals were working over capacity. I spoke to a doctor I know at AUH [American University hospital], which is a prestigious hospital there, he told me, “Rana, you can’t imagine what we are handling, we have people queuing up outside, we’ve turned the main entrance into a makeshift emergency room, we have people in the corridors, we have people in the operations theater. It’s like a slaughterhouse.”

Nick Wallis: I can imagine, and it must have been horrendous for you personally to have so many people you knew who could have been affected and who were affected by this. And obviously you are also trying to process how this happened and why this happened and what caused it. In the initial aftermath, immediately afterwards, there was talk of terrorism. When did it become clear that it had actually been fertilizer that had been stored in a warehouse that was the source of this explosion?

Rana Sabbagh: By the second morning, we started hearing from sources inside the port that some workers were welding the door of this warehouse which had the deadly stock stored in it. And this warehouse wasn’t just made up of the bags of nitrate ammonium. It also had firecrackers that had been seized, it had paint, it had everything possible that would come together as a cocktail to make this worst explosion in history. And everybody had been saying: “There’s a ticking bomb. We’re just waiting for it to explode.” And nobody took these warnings seriously. The president and the prime minister were notified by the security [agencies] two weeks before the explosion that this material had to be removed safely and had to be stored in a proper warehouse. You can’t just leave something like this standing there in horrible conditions with minimum protection.

Nick Wallis: Can you give me a sense of what Beirut was actually like and how vibrant the city was before the explosion?

Rana Sabbagh: The whole world always referred to Lebanon as the Switzerland of the Middle East for different reasons. Lebanon is a beautiful country in terms of nature. It’s got forests, it’s got ski resorts, and in 20 minutes you can be water skiing and jet skiing and fishing in the most beautiful Mediterranean waters. The country also is very well known for being the commercial center and the banking center for the Arab world in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

But Lebanon, unfortunately because of its beauty, we always say in Arabic, was given a bad eye and ended up falling into a civil war that lasted from ‘75 to 1990. And this civil war was brutal, but even during the civil war, when the city was divided in two, there was East Beirut and West Beirut, East Beirut was mostly inhabited by Christians, and West Beirut became mostly the Sunni stronghold and then the Shi’ites [were in] villages and towns beyond that. So, there was a deep fracture along religious lines and factional lines.

But in 1990, after the Taif Agreement in Saudi Arabia, the agreement that was brokered with Saudi Arabia, Lebanon started regaining its presence. A lot of the Lebanese expatriates, the highly educated, skilled people — 60,000 people came back to Lebanon. And the prime minister then put a lot of money to invest in the infrastructure, in a new airport, and the city was up and running.

Nick Wallis: And Beirut was a busy port.

Rana Sabbagh: The problem of this port is it’s in the middle of the city. There have been negotiations going on for 30 years to move it to an area which is not so intrusive into the city.

Nick Wallis: You decided almost immediately after the explosions that this had to be a big story for OCCRP and your investigation had to be put together and published quickly. How did you organize your colleagues and your partner media organizations to get the investigation out [in] the same month?

Rana Sabbagh: Aubrey and I wrote to our Google group, the editors, and we said: “There has been this horrific explosion and we need to look at it.” And then we started lining up colleagues, so of course I automatically contacted our local partners, the team from Daraj.com media, and I contacted Riad Kobiassi, who is one of the top-notch investigative reporters in Lebanon who I’ve known for 12 years. And I said: “We need to work on the Lebanese side of the explosion.”

As you know, Hezbollah is an ally of the Syrian regime, so this was one of the theories and we pursued it, but after a while we shut it down because we looked at traders and we spoke to other experts, they were putting cold water on it. And then we saw a Reuters report, and the journalist that wrote it said one of the scenarios says there had been welding operations going on inside this number 12 depot, and probably there was a spark which caught fire and then the combustion material just went up in the air. So, we started pursuing it on different levels.

Nick Wallis: Just if I may, could I bring in Aubrey here? Aubrey, what was your role initially when the OCCRP investigation kicked off.

Aubrey Belford: When this explosion happened, I think like a lot of people, I was just glued to the coverage of this huge fireball and shockwave ripping through the city. And I took it really personally because my best friend was actually just living around the corner from the port up until about a week before the explosion, and he’d just left and his apartment building was really severely damaged. So, Rana first emailed our email list for OCCRP journalists and said we had to go big on this story, and I volunteered to take part in it as well. At this time, I was living in Kyiv and my role really was to put together this team of journalists to pursue all of the international angles that this was throwing up.

Pretty quickly, we could see that the cause of the explosion was this ammonium nitrate that had been sitting in the port for seven years. And immediately the question was: well, how did it end up there and how did it stay there for so long? And being as familiar as we are with how this murky world of offshore finance works, we knew that there had to be this absolute mess of shell companies, anonymous owners, and blind alleys that were hiding the true activities of the people that were shipping that cargo. And that’s exactly what it turned out [to be].

We put together this team, we had colleagues in Cyprus, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Georgia, in Mozambique, in Lebanon and in Jordan, all working together, just trying to ferret out little bits of this story. And the first thing we really focused on was this question of who actually owned this ship and how was this absolutely unseaworthy ship still able to sail with this dangerous cargo?

Nick Wallis: This was the Rhosus.

Aubrey Belford: The Rhosus. What happened is the Rhosus stopped in Beirut on its way between Georgia, where it had picked up the ammonium nitrate, and Mozambique, where it was going to sell it to an explosives factory. When it got into Beirut, there were some unpaid debts against the ship that led to the ship being stopped in port. And then when it was inspected, it was found that this ship was not seaworthy at all. And so it ended up being stopped in port.

The person who was thought to be the owner of the Rhosus, a Russian man by the name of Igor Grechushkin, he basically just left the ship there, and the crew ended up spending 10 months stuck at port. And that’s the story of how this ammonium nitrate ended up in the warehouse. So, our role as reporters was to work out how was it that that ship was still able to sail and how was it that they were able to so easily walk away from their responsibilities?

And so that’s where our expertise [came in] as journalists that look into the complex documents that you need to look at to work out this gray zone of global capitalism, when you’re looking at shipping or pretty much any kind of trade where things are obscured. We kind of banded together very quickly to use our experience with that to just answer those questions.

Nick Wallis: How hard was it to try to get to the bottom of what was going on in the immediate aftermath of the event and the emergency response from the authorities?

Rana Sabbagh: It was like an earthquake had hit the city. Imagine, it took five days to clear the debris and the shrapnel and the broken glass from around the port, so my colleagues couldn’t even move in their cars, they couldn’t reach the actual port, it was sealed off, so they were going through little alleys, walking on foot. But imagine the soaring heat, 40 degrees in direct sun, in addition to the suffocating humidity of Beirut.

So, they’re trying to reach the port. They’re trying to go to hospitals. Hospitals were swamped. You had 2,500 buildings that had collapsed, all the debris had blocked the roads and every member of our team — Daraj has ten reporters, six out of ten were directly impacted by this blast. So, one lost a family member, one had a son who got injured, so imagine. The journalists are trying to care for their family. They don’t have electricity. They’re trying to balance between the need to do the reporting and at the same time do the minimum to move on with their lives.

They all told me later on that this anger is what kept them going. “How can this happen? How did they allow it to happen? How reckless can these people be?” So, from a logistic point of view, it was a nightmare to get people on foot, to get reporters doing the reporting, and then to access the court documents. This was my biggest, biggest surprise.

As much as Lebanon is touted as a modern city and it’s got these beautiful state of the art buildings, the court system is still relying on old-fashioned handwritten testimonials, and you have to go there yourself and you have to go through thousands and thousands of documents. We couldn’t really understand the handwriting. Our reporters didn’t get anywhere until we came across this amazing lawyer who also had her house devastated and had a family member injured, and she was so angry, she said: “I will do anything to help you. We have to work together to expose these criminals.”

And she went with us from courtroom to courtroom with a journalist and she came together and pieced the timeline, the legal timeline that showed us this maze of correspondence that was going back and forth between ministries over formalities. “You do this.” “No you should do that.” This started from the minute the ship arrived to the port.

In any normal country, the cargo should have been removed from day one and stored in a safe place, and later on you could discuss what to do with the ship and the cargo and the owners. What these people did, they were just fighting [over] who gets a say and they kept it there until it exploded. So, this was the thing that drove everybody mad.

Nick Wallis: What about the anger of the people? How was that directed towards the authorities and how did the authorities respond?

Rana Sabbagh: Funny enough, the authorities could not take [it that] people that took to the streets and started demonstrating, and I remember around the 10th of August, there was a group of protesters outside parliament, asking parliament: “Please, please launch an investigation, do something.” Instead of just assuaging their fears and calming them down, they started firing at them — water, and then rubber bullets.

Nick Wallis: Is that down to the factionalism within Lebanese politics —

Rana Sabbagh: Exactly.

Nick Wallis: — or is it more generalized corruption? It’s the factionalism, is it? Well explain that to people who don’t know that much about Lebanese politics.

Rana Sabbagh: Beautiful Lebanon has always had a strength and a weakness, which is it’s made up of at least 18 religious and ethnic mixes. So, it’s a beautiful mosaic in the Middle East, which is mainly Muslim Sunni or Muslim Shi’ite. So, in Lebanon, post-Taif Agreement — the agreement that was brokered by Saudi Arabia to achieve peace after the civil war — it made sure, for example, the head of the state has to be a Christian Maronite, the head of the government has to be a Sunni Muslim. The head of parliament has to be a Shi’ite. So, the whole system in Lebanon is made up of these politicians that are representing religious factions and political parties that have been created along religious ideology.

And as a result, everyone is just scratching the back of the others. To move on, every one of these people is basically eating a slice of the cake and sharing it with the people that back him, the people that are the backbone of his political party or the power structures. This has crippled Lebanon. It has fed corruption. Lebanon is among the most corrupt countries in the Arab world.

Nick Wallis: Rana, thank you for painting that picture of the situation within Lebanon and of course the inaction from the authorities in moving that ammonium nitrate is a huge part of this story.

But Aubrey of course, the story of how the ship came into port and how that ammonium nitrate, what it was actually doing there, your investigation uncovered this extraordinary, opaque web of companies and individuals and authorities who had allowed this to happen. I know this was an investigation that was published more than a year after the explosion. And it’s a wonderful piece of work in how it details how it all came together, but it’s such an astonishing feat of journalism and painstaking work. Just take me through the logistics of putting it together in the first place. What did you know you were looking for and how did you go about finding it?

Aubrey Belford: Our first investigation was really about who owned the ship. The immediate media reports came out and said that the owner was this guy called Igor Grechushkin. But pretty quickly, we were able to determine that he wasn’t the owner, that he was actually leasing the ship off its true owner, who was a shipping businessman in Cyprus called Charalambos Manoli.

And the more we looked into it, we discovered that not only did this guy Manoli own the Rhosus, this unseaworthy ship with unpaid debts that ended up getting seized in Beirut, but he was also responsible for getting it its flag, which was from Moldova, and he also owned the agency in Georgia that had declared it seaworthy. So, he had flagged his own ship secretly and declared his own ship as seaworthy. And so, we ended up finding this incredibly convoluted web that is really very routine.

There’s just so many things that go on in international shipping that are just so wild and there’s so much secrecy. It is very, very routine for ships to be registered in what are called flags of convenience jurisdictions. Moldova, where the Rhosus was flagged, doesn’t have a coastline, but you can still flag a ship as Moldovan.

The ship was owned through an anonymous company in I believe Panama and was then leased and operated by a company registered in the Marshall Islands. These are normally countries where you just don’t know who owns these. The only way we were able to actually work out the ownership was because it had been mentioned in a court case and then that gave us the ability to then unravel who was truly behind it.

Nick Wallis: You talk about a number of the jurisdictions where perhaps people might expect shady things to happen, but there’s a British company very deeply involved in this story, isn’t there?

Aubrey Belford: Yes. And the British company involved in this was really one of the biggest mysteries of all. That company was called Savaro, and Savaro was the company that owned this cargo of ammonium nitrate, and thus was really one of the most responsible parties for trying to retrieve this really dangerous cargo after it ended up in the port in Beirut.

So, on paper, this was a British company. But if you go and you check in the British records, the path just leads to a firm in Cyprus that basically exists just to register companies and obscure their true owners and really caters towards former Soviet countries. So there was this real mystery that you had this supposedly British company that owned it, but no one actually knew who was behind it.

So, we spent a year really working hard to work out who actually should have been retrieving it. And our investigations led us to Ukraine, where I happened to be living at the time, and to a city really not far from where I was living. But the amount of effort taken to get there was just, it was insane. We tried to reach Grechushkin, who was the operator of the ship, but he would not speak to us. He wouldn’t answer any messages.

Manoli was someone we spoke to. He initially denied that he was the owner of the ship and claimed that he had sold the ship onwards. Then when we found evidence that showed that he was the owner of the ship and that he was leasing it out to another operator and that he had been the one that had been responsible for flagging it and for certifying that it was seaworthy, then he said; “Oh no, yes, that’s true, but I have actually sold it and I’ll show you the documents.” And then when we tried to set up a call with him for him to show us the documents proving that he had made this transaction, he wouldn’t show it to us. And the thing is, most of the time, all these sort of machinations are things that you just can’t see because these are all anonymous companies. We were very lucky to actually pierce the veil and find the names of people behind this.

Nick Wallis: And given the level of your investigation and the depth you were able to get to, is anyone involved or any of the companies involved now facing any form of legal action as a result of the explosion?

Aubrey Belford: The British company that owned the ammonium nitrate, which is really a Ukrainian-owned company, is being sued by victims of the explosion in court in the United Kingdom. They’re arguing that as the owner of the cargo, that they bear ultimate responsibility for the disaster and should have some civil liability for that.

Nick Wallis: What direct impact do you think your reporting has actually had in terms of making a difference, either for the victims or the families or the politicians or the lawyers in terms of trying to get someone to be held accountable for this whole disaster?

Rana Sabbagh: The first investigation was very timely because it clearly put on the table the name of the ship operator and it basically came up with new names, it had everything much, much clearer. Some families of the victims have also used it to show the crime and the collusion between all these shell companies that were facilitated by these international corporate corruption services.

And it really exposed a lot locally. So, it definitely was also a turning point for many local media that decided to embrace that genre of work by focusing more on [investigations] that basically leave out all the political bullying that’s happening, because in Lebanon, even though the media is very diverse, every media outlet is the spokesperson of their political party. So, when someone like OCCRP was able to work with a local partner who’s also extremely independent, we were able to call a spade a spade. That was really something to look up to and to emulate.

Nick Wallis: That was Rana Al-Sabbagh, the OCCRP’s senior editor for the Middle East and North Africa, and Aubrey Belford, the OCCRP’s Pacific editor.

Paul Naggear and his partner Tracy lived and worked less than a kilometer from the blast site at Beirut Port. Their daughter, Alexandra, was known to the family as Lexou. I started by asking Paul what she was like.

Paul Naggear: Oh, she’s a fantastic human being, full of energy, very, very happy kid, full of life, very loving, very, very close to us as a family. But she had a very outgoing personality. During Covid, she would actually start making calls from our phones to our friends in the U.S. and all, spending half-hours and hours with them. Just an amazing kid. An amazing, amazing child.

Nick Wallis: I’m really sorry to have to take you back to the events of the 4th of August.

Paul Naggear: Don’t worry about it, ask whatever is needed. What we are doing is for the cause of our daughter. And there’s no limit to the extent that we would go to get our justice. And this is part of it. So really, don’t worry about it.

Nick Wallis: Okay. Well, I absolutely understand and I also really appreciate it. If you are able, could you just take us back to the beginning of the day before the blast, what you were doing, what Tracy was doing, what Alexandra was doing and where you came to be?

Paul Naggear: Yes, on the 4th of August. So it was a Tuesday. It was a regular day, working day for us. Tracy and I set up our own company a couple years back and we were working together from home. Our house is in Gemmayzeh, which is in the red zone compared to the epicenter of the blast, which is right in the harbor, and Hangar 12 that exploded is 850 meters to a kilometer far from us, just so that you and the other people can situate.

Before the blasts, I was having a call and I’m walking around in the house, I saw smoke coming out of the hangar. I asked Tracy to come and check it out, she did and then we heard the first explosion. Being Lebanese, I think we’re a bit used to it, so we didn’t panic. But then when we started, there was a second, a really massive sound that started to build up. And Tracy immediately felt that we were being attacked from the air. And so, she rushed us to leave from where we were, so we were right at the balcony level looking at the hangar. Tracy shouted at us to run. Lexou was running ahead of her and then she grabbed her and at the moment when she grabbed her, the second and the big blast happened. Tracy had managed to catch Alexandra.

They were both propelled a few meters and they found themselves in the ruins of our house. I was also propelled and I don’t know if I hit something, but when I woke up our house was completely destroyed. There was nothing left. I had bleeding from my face and the first thing that I did was to rush to find Tracy and Lexou. I found them lying underneath two or three of our doors and also the full ceiling that fell on Tracy. But what Tracy had tried to do was to, as she grabbed Alexandra and they were propelled, when they hit the floor, the first thing that she did was to actually grab Lexou and pull her underneath her. So, she was protecting Lexou with her body. Lexou was shielded because everything fell on Tracy.

Nick Wallis: Was Lexou conscious? Was Alexandra conscious?

Paul Naggear: They were both conscious. Lexou was actually doing okay but she was still able to talk. She was able to say “maman” which is mom.

Nick Wallis: So what happened in the next few hours?

Paul Naggear: The first thing that we, as a reflex and with all the adrenaline kicking in there was no fear, it was just: “I need to get Lexou and Tracy to a hospital.” Tracy was actually in a much worse shape because the damage that happened to her was more external. Tracy ended up having, other than the outside wounds, she had three broken ribs, three broken vertebrae, one broken finger, a detachment of the lungs. I don’t know how she managed to go down seven flights of stairs.

There was no more elevator so we had to take the stairs to go down. We went on the streets, Nick, and it was total chaos. Imagine that you’re on the street with everything destroyed around you, cars, shops. There’s an actual Red Cross center 50 meters from our house and it was completely dysfunctional because the ambulance had been blasted away and there was no way for cars to pass. So, the first thing that we did was to go down, I was carrying Lexou and trying to keep her as stable as I can, although she had nothing as outside injuries because she was completely shielded by Tracy.

Nick Wallis: When did it become obvious she was deteriorating?

Paul Naggear: I think when we arrived at the bottom of the building, when we managed to finish up with the stairs and we arrived at the bottom of the building, she started to start losing a bit of consciousness. This is where we started getting worried. There was no one to help us, Nick, on the streets. That is very important to note. Now that we know in retrospect that everybody in government, in parliament, etc., knew somehow about the ammonium nitrate.

They had 40 minutes or so to react, in 40 minutes, even if you don’t find a way to actually ask your civilians to evacuate or to hide or to seek shelter — because none of this would have happened to us if they had told us, “Emergency, everybody hit the parking lot or stay in your bathrooms,” I don’t know. But even if they hadn’t managed to do that, at least you would expect minimum support from the army, from the security forces, from the firefighter departments, you name it. But there was nothing. Tracy told me: “Leave me, go, run. Do whatever you have to take Lexou, she’s not looking well.” We had to hitchhike, her and I, on a — not even a motorcycle, so a scooter, that took us to the nearest hospital, which was also completely destroyed. But I had to carry my daughter who was in extremely bad shape on a motorcycle because there was no one else, Nick.

Nick Wallis: And when you arrived at the hospital, how easy was it to get her seen and to get treatment for her?

Paul Naggear: Quite fast because when they saw that it was a child not looking well, they prioritized her. So, they were able to diagnose her quickly, tell me that her situation was not good at all because she was starting to lose consciousness and she was not reactive and she was also in a very high level of stress. But Nadine, who is one of the doctors there, managed to, I don’t know how she did it, to find us an ambulance and prioritize us getting in the ambulance and hitting the final destination, which was the Hôtel-Dieu hospital a few minutes away.

Nick Wallis: When were you told that it was unlikely that Lexou was going to make it?

Paul Naggear: The same night, Nick, after they did scans and they found out that although she didn’t have anything apparent, her skull was completely broken. She had multiple fractures from different areas on her skull, and a very, very big hematoma in her brain, which was the main cause of the problem and her death.

They told us at it was probably around the same night, the night of the 6th to the 7th, a specialist neurosurgeon, and he also turned out to be specialized in in pediatrics, told me that we didn’t have another choice than to do an open skull intervention, so basically they leave space for the brain to expand because of the hematoma, and that her chances were not so good. And the next day they started being more and more concerned and telling us that she was not reactive to clinical examination.

Nick Wallis: Did you get a chance to say goodbye?

Paul Naggear: Well, not consciously, because the first thing that they did because of her state when we reached the final hospital is that they put her in an induced coma so that they could treat her. So, no, not consciously.

It kills you man, it kills you. So many emotions. From what I’ve lived, there’s nothing more difficult than that, not close, because you love the person so much. The missing is huge. You see your partner suffering from that. Lexou and Tracy had a unique relationship in my eyes, of course, and they were really, really close, and when you see your partner hurting also, it’s a constant reminder of the pain.

You feel guilt because I wasn’t able to protect them, I’m telling you as a father. The anger is really big also, Nick, and all of these feelings, some people tell you, and they shouldn’t, they tell you that time heals. It’s not true, at least not for us, and maybe it’s because for us, we consider it as murder, and it was such trauma and it came really unexpected. It’s not like Lexou was sick or we were expecting it. In three days, our life was completely turned upside down. I don’t know if death is easier, but you feel the pain and anger and missing, and it’s something that never goes away.

Nick Wallis: Whilst OCCRP had been digging into the corporate interests which brought the lethal cargo to Beirut port and the multiple failures of the Lebanese authorities, Paul and Tracy Naggear were pursuing their own campaign for justice in memory of their daughter Lexou. Anticipating a long slog, Paul told me that he and many other victims looked to the international community for help.

Paul Naggear: We were very convinced from the beginning that we would not get justice locally, so how can we fight internationally? There were two areas for us. The first one was trying to obtain an independent fact-finding mission from the United Nations Human Rights Council. And this came from a lot of thinking and brainstorming with a couple of institutions like Legal Action Worldwide and Human Rights Watch. We narrowed it down to this being the best strategy to go for, and we’ve been lobbying for that ever since, to get this fact-finding mission done, and this is still an ongoing subject that hasn’t been adopted as a resolution, unfortunately, for reasons that we can discuss it in a bit. The second point was —

Nick Wallis: Tell me now, actually, because I understand that some elements of the international community are for some reason resisting a fact-finding mission. Who and why?

Paul Naggear: It’s actually France. For whatever reason, [it is] the ongoing French government that was not facilitating the proposition of this resolution.

Nick Wallis: Why?

Paul Naggear: You can assume whatever geopolitical interest that would come first would matter more to a few government officials than human lives and the seeking of justice. I don’t know what it is.

Nick Wallis: It must be so frustrating because, as you say, you almost accept that locally you’re not going to make much progress because of the corruption and the inertia of the authorities. But you would have thought the international community would want to get to the bottom of it and help the victims.

Paul Naggear: Yes. And for now, the only thing that we see is that this is a total myth. The international community support, United Nations support — it’s really just a myth, Nick, for us.

Nick Wallis: I understand why you feel that way. It’s been two years since the explosion now. Do you have any optimism that there will be change?

Paul Naggear: When we first started out, this mission for justice for Lexou, Tracy and I were optimistic because what happened right after the blast and the weeks following the blast was a fantastic humanitarian movement. In total absence of the government, the Lebanese citizens were able to come together from all parts of the country to rebuild the affected areas, to clean the affected areas, to provide shelter when they could, food.

We saw this great movement of solidarity which made us believe, really Tracy and I — that there is a horrible regime that is in place, but we have fantastic people. Unfortunately, 80% of the MPs that were elected are still pro-regime. And it’s a very clear sign for us that more than half of the people are against us because these people are the ones that killed us and brought us where we were — these politicians.

Nick Wallis: You mentioned you received help from various NGOs and human rights organizations, and of course, you drew strength from the community in Beirut who’d lost loved ones. Does journalism have a role to play in this?

Paul Naggear: Yes, most definitely. In the absence of an independent, strong judiciary, who can you rely on other than the likes of journalism? If it wasn’t for the journalism, we would really have no idea of the truth. But unfortunately, I think they didn’t go all the way and I think there’s more work that needs to be done by investigative journalism. We have lost faith in the international community’s ability to help.

The issue, Nick, is that there’s a huge dissonance from what we have seen between people and politicians or governments. I want to be able to believe that we live in a world where the international community puts my daughter’s life before economic, political, geographical interests.

Nick Wallis: Paul Naggear, who lost his daughter Lexou in the explosion. When contacted to put his side of the story, Igor Grechushkin declined to comment. Charalambos Manoli responded by saying that he is suing the OCCRP and Der Spiegel in Cyprus and has been asked not to talk about the case. He states that he was not the owner of the vessel at the relevant time and claims the accusations made against him are false. Savaro denied the allegations and claimed the ammonium nitrate was under the control of the Lebanese authorities.

If you want to read OCCRP’s report on the Beirut explosion, search OCCRP Beirut. The first report is called “A Hidden Tycoon, African Explosives, and a Loan from a Notorious Bank: Questionable Connections Surround Beirut Explosion Ship.” Dirty Deeds: Tales of Global Crime & Corruption was produced by Lindsay Riley with research from Phoebe Adler-Ryan and Riham Moussa at Rethink Audio. The series is a Little Gem production for OCCRP. Please like, follow, and subscribe to ensure you don’t miss more stories behind the stories of global crime and corruption investigated by OCCRP. My name is Nick Wallis. See you next time.

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