At least 28 people have died and more than 800 were injured by, in the city of Bandar Abbas, in southern Iran.
“28 people have died so far in the explosion of the Shahid Rajai port and 20 people are in intensive care units,” said the head of the Iranian Red Moon, Mohammad Javad Kulivand, according to the IRNA agency.
Iranian authorities have assured that it has nothing to do with the country’s military operations and have asked to await the results of the ongoing research.
“According to the initial reports, which caught fire in the incident of the Shahid Rajae port has no connection with the country’s defense sector,” said the spokesman for the National Security and Foreign Policy Commission of the Islamic Advisory Assembly, Ebrahim Rezaei, in his account of the social network X.
The Puerto Customs Office published a statement on Saturday in which it pointed out that the cause of the explosion would probably have been a fire originating in a chemical warehouse, which would have caused a chain reaction of other deposits with flammable material.
The country’s crisis management organization reported in its last statement that some 752 people have been transferred to medical centers since the outbreak occurred, whose majority have been discharged after receiving medical care.
“190 people are currently hospitalized,” said the document. In addition, hundreds of people received outpatient treatment at the place of the explosion, which occurred on the eve, after several containers that supposedly contained chemicals and were stored in one of the docks of the port of Shahid Rajai.
The outbreak was so strong that he could feel up to 50 kilometers away and caused a tremor in the nearby areas, and shattered the windows of the buildings and damaged the cars parked around the port.
Iranian president, Masud fishshkian, ordered an investigation to clarify the causes of the incident in the port of Shahid Rajai, the most modern and important of Iran, located in the Ormuz Strait, which manages more than 55% of exports and imports of the country, 70% of its port transit and more than 80% of container traffic.
This port suffered a cyber attack that paralyzed its activities in 2020 and which Iran accused Israel. Shahid Rajai is a commercial and industrial port in Bandar Abás, capital of the province of Hormozgan, and has an area of more than 2,400 hectares and an annual capacity to receive more than 88 million tons of goods.
