Joseph Naddaf is puzzled, and it is not hard to see why. He was the one man who tried to stop the disaster at Beirut port, the explosion which a year ago this week ripped through the city, enveloping it in flames and smoke, and killed 200 people.
The state security major had repeatedly warned his superiors of the impending disaster, his files on the dangers of the ammonium nitrate stashed in Hangar 12 reaching the desk of the president. Yet afterwards he was interrogated, arrested and held in jail for eight months.
He has now been released on bail, but still faces charges, even though he is back at his job and continuing to investigate the corruption at the port that many say was the underlying cause of last year’s trauma.
At first, he says, he thought he was victim of a fishing trip, a trawl of anyone who had information. But then he was transferred to Beirut’s general security prison, and ended up in a cell for eight months. “I was surprised,” he said in an interview with The Times, with some understatement. “‘Why was this?’ I asked myself.”
The politicians and generals whom he warned about the nitrate still walk free, claiming immunity through office.
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The comparison between their fate and that of Naddaf, detained with 24 other mid-ranking or junior officials and technicians for “complicity”, has become a symbol for many Lebanese of not just the blast’s injustice but the brazenness of the country’s ruling system.
Sitting in a small office in central Beirut, Naddaf is not allowed to talk about the politics of the disaster. The issue remains sensitive, and permission to speak to him had to be obtained personally from the head of state security, General Antoine “Tony” Saliba.
The blast is Lebanon’s touchstone issue, amid a broader economic and political crisis, and the anniversary on Wednesday is expected to trigger protests to rival those that toppled its last relatively stable government in 2019.
But Naddaf’s reticence does not mean he does not take his extraordinary fate personally. “I wrote four reports in five months,” he said. “In each one, I warned about the danger of the nitrate.
“All I can do is write reports. That’s my job. I can’t go beyond that. So I was shocked when they arrested me. The person who first interrogated me said I should be rewarded.”
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Beirut is not the only city to have suffered destruction by ammonium nitrate. The compound is a regularly traded commodity in everyday use as a fertiliser, but is also highly volatile. A similar explosion in Tianjin, China, in 2015 killed 173 people.
Beirut’s was similar in nature but wildly different in political effect. It happened in the heart of the capital, slicing through business and residential districts, and damaging or destroying some of the city’s most celebrated historic buildings.
Thousands were injured. The dead were a roster of Beirut life. They included ten firefighters; pensioners, office workers; the Dutch ambassador’s wife; Syrian refugees; waitresses; a celebrated architect; and the grande dame of Lebanese Christian high society — 98-year-old Yvonne Sursock, Lady Cochrane, blown across her family’s palace. The youngest was the two-year-old son of an Australian UN worker.
The tale of incompetence which led to the explosion reflected Lebanon’s other catastrophe: a continuing economic collapse whose approach analysts repeatedly predicted but the government ignored. The EU has threatened to impose sanctions on Lebanon’s ruling elite as the country has been left with no government and is struggling with a financial crisis that the World Bank has described as one of the worst since the 1850s.
Naddaf arrived at the port 25 minutes after the blast and realised quickly what had happened. Officials subsequently released details of how his previous reports had been transferred upwards, until the last landed on the desks of President Aoun and the prime minister, Hassan Diab.
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Naddaf had been specially chosen to lead a mission to address popular concerns about corruption at the port, starting work in April 2019. Later that year, he was tipped off about the nitrate, and found it in Hangar 12, with a door missing and a hole in the wall.
He was worried it might explode. He was also worried it might be stolen, he said.
In a terrible irony, it may have been his persistence that led to the disaster.
The most common if, as yet, unproven theory is that the fire that triggered the blast was caused by welders sent to secure the door. The hangar was also used to store confiscated fireworks.
The explosion also cast a harsh light on how the port was run, a secret that everyone knew. Its managers are said to answer to a variety of political factions, including Hezbollah but also Sunni, Christian and Druze parties. Each can arrange its own illicit imports and extract bribes and cuts.
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The nitrate arrived in 2013 and was off-loaded after the cargo ship carrying it was declared unseaworthy. Its destination was listed as Mozambique: the mystery was who arranged the shipment, and why it was not transferred on, returned or sold.
An investigative television programme claimed earlier this year that the shippers shared an office address with a businessman linked to President Assad, the Syrian leader. The suggestion was that the ammonium nitrate was deliberately brought to Beirut to be taken to Syria to stuff the regime’s barrel bombs.
A leaked FBI report now says that far from the 2,750 tonnes of nitrate on the ship’s papers, the explosion was compatible with a stock of about just 550 tonnes. Four fifths, in other words, was missing — though the theft saved Beirut from an even worse fate.
What is clear is that Naddaf’s clean-up job was a “mission impossible”, yet he says no one ever interfered with his work.
However, he is well aware of the dangers. Two people with links to the explosion have been murdered in unexplained circumstances since — a former customs official and an official photographer at the scene.
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Even before the blast, shots were fired at his house, an apparent warning, however he does not know whether it related to his reports on Hangar 12 or other corruption investigations.
Uppermost in his mind now, though, are the dead of August 4, 2020, who included one of his own men. “I was arrested but I came back to my family,” he said. “They did not.”
And then, of course, there is the pain of knowing it could have been stopped, and that he had tried to stop it.
“It’s very difficult,” he said. “Every second, every minute, every day I cannot forget it. And when I say that, I don’t just mean once a day, I mean every minute.”
