Hezbollah purchased explosive material during time of port storage—report

The scene of an explosion in Beirut on August 4, 2020. The blast, which rattled entire buildings and broke glass, was felt in several parts of the city.

(photo credit: ANWAR AMRO/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES)

The paper wrote that the “Welt has exclusive information from Western secret services. Accordingly, the [Hezbollah] militia bought large quantities of the dangerous substance,” adding that “After the disaster in the port of Beirut, Hezbollah was suspected of having been involved in the storage of the explosive ammonium nitrate.”

Die Welt reported that “according to information from Western secret services that are available to Welt, Hezbollah in Lebanon received large deliveries of ammonium nitrate, which are closely related to the material detonated in Beirut.”

The Welt said it is not certain if the  ammonium nitrate at the port was the same ammonum nitrate shipped around the same time to Hezbollah in 2013 and 2014. Hezbollah’s purchasing of ammonium nitrate was shipped through the port and other amounts via  airport or overland through Syria.

The Jerusalem Post could not verify the unnamed Western intelligence sources contained in Welt’s story.

The explosion of the ammonium nitrate during the first week of August killed at least 177 people and injured 6,000. The explosive material was believed to have been stored at the port since 2014.

The Welt wrote that Hezbollah had considerable quantities of ammonium nitrate delivered to Lebanon precisely at that time [late  2013 or early 2014]. The Quds unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, i.e. the part of those paramilitaries responsible for foreign operations, which also have a key political position in Iran, is said to have been responsible for the transport.”

Welt listed a number of Hezbollah and Iranian regime operatives involved in the deliveries of ammonium nitrate to the port. Mohammad Qasir, who who was sanctioned by the US goverment for financing Hezbollah. was listed as a deliverer of the explosive material.

Matthew Levitt, who serves as the director of the Washington Institute’s Reinhard Program on Counterterrorism and Intelligence told the Post that” Qasir heads Lebanese Hezbollah unit 108, responsible for facilitating transfer of weapons and tech from Iran to Lebanon via Syria. Based in Damascus, Qasir and other senior Hezbollah officials work closely with officers from Quds Force’s Unit 190—which specializes in smuggling weapons to Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, and Gaza—under the supervision of the late Qassem Soleimani.”

He said that the” purported effort to procure ammonium nitrate to the 2,750 tons of ammonium-nitrate that blew up earlier this month” are not linked to his account of Qasir’s terrorist activities outlined to the Post.

Levitt, a leading Hezbollah expert, added that “The first link in the weapons transportation chain is Qasir’s Unit 108, which is responsible for moving weapons across Syria to the Lebanese border and then, together with Unit 112, transporting weapons across the border into Lebanon. Another Hezbollah unit, Unit 100, runs a ratline in the reverse direction, from Lebanon to Syria to Iran, ferrying Hezbollah trainees to and from advanced training in the handling and use of the rockets delivered from Iran.

He continued that “Qasir, aka Hajj Fadi, is uniquely qualified to head a unit as sensitive and important as Unit 108. One of Qasir’s brothers, Hassan, is reportedly the son-in-law of Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrallah. Another brother, Ahmed Qasir, was the suicide bomber who carried out the November 1992 attack on an Israeli military headquarters in Tyre. Nasrallah referred to Ahmed as the ‘prince of martyrs’ at a Martyrs Foundation event marking the anniversary of the attack.”