Captain who brought explosive to Beirut: ’If I knew, I would not have boarded the ship'

The chemicals that went up in flames in Beirut's deadliest peace-time explosion arrived in the Lebanese capital seven years ago on a leaky Russian-leased cargo ship that, according to its captain, should never have stopped there.

Boris Prokoshev, 70, was captain of the Rhosus in 2013 when he says the owner told him to make an unscheduled stop in Lebanon to pick up extra cargo.

Mr Prokoshev said the ship was carrying 2,750 tonnes of a highly combustible chemical from Georgia to Mozambique when the order came to divert to Beirut on its way through the Mediterranean.

The crew were asked to load some heavy road equipment and take it to Jordan's Port of Aqaba before resuming their journey onto Africa, where the ammonium nitrate was to be delivered to an explosives manufacturer.

But the ship was never to leave Beirut, having tried and failed to safely load the additional cargo before becoming embroiled in a lengthy legal dispute over port fees.

The captain and lawyers acting for some creditors accused the ship's owner of abandoning the vessel and succeeded in having it arrested. Months later, for safety reasons, the ammonium nitrate was unloaded and put in a dock warehouse.

On Tuesday, that stockpile caught fire and exploded not far from a built-up residential area of the city. The huge blast killed 145 people, injured 5,000, flattened buildings and made more than a quarter of a million people homeless.

Read the latest on the Beirut blast here: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/beirut/?WT.mc_id=tmg_youtube_offsite_televideo-youtubevideo_Aug7ShipCaptain&utm_source=tmgoff&utm_medium=tmg_youtube&utm_content=offsite_televideo&utm_campaign=tmg_youtube_offsite_televideo-youtubevideo_Aug7ShipCaptain

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