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Beirut (AFP) – A French judicial delegation met on Wednesday, the judicial investigator in the Beirut port explosion case, during a visit aimed at inquiring about information requested by the French judiciary and did not receive answers about it, according to a judicial official told AFP.
The investigation into the explosion that occurred on August 4, 2020, has been pending since the end of 2021 due to lawsuits filed successively by defendants, including current MPs and former ministers, against the judicial investigator, Judge Tariq Al-Bitar, who supervises the investigations.
The judicial official said that a French delegation, including two judges in charge of a French investigation into the explosion, met Bitar on Wednesday in his office at the Palace of Justice in Beirut, in two meetings, one of which lasted four hours.
The French delegation was supposed to arrive in Beirut next week, but the date was brought closer. It is not clear when the delegation, which arrived two days ago in Beirut, will leave, and whether it will hold additional meetings in Lebanon.
The official explained that Bitar “refuted the stages of the investigation, what remained of it, and the obstacles it faced for more than a year,” but “he refused to inform the delegation of the content of the investigation or provide it with any document, given that his hand was removed from the file due to the response claims filed against him.”
About a week after the explosion, the Public Prosecution Office in Paris assigned two investigating judges in the Mass Accidents Department to investigate the port explosion, given the presence of Frenchmen among the victims. A judicial investigation was opened on charges of “manslaughter” and “unintentional injury”.
The French judiciary had sent judicial letters of recommendation to Lebanon, but it did not receive any answer regarding it, as the Lebanese investigation is still pending.
There are at least two French dead and more than ninety injured, among the more than 215 dead and 6,500 wounded, as a result of the explosion, which resulted, according to the authorities, from storing huge quantities of ammonium nitrate inside the port without preventive measures, after a fire broke out, the causes of which are unknown. It turned out later that officials at several levels were aware of the dangers of storing the substance and did not move a finger.
Human rights organizations are calling on the United Nations to send an independent fact-finding mission, in the face of the stumbling of the local investigation.
The suspension of the investigation and the repeated political interventions fuel the anger of a number of the families of the victims of the explosion.
On Friday, the security forces arrested William Noun, one of the most prominent spokesmen for the families of the victims, because of statements he made on television during a sit-in, in which he said that they might “break” or “blow up” the Palace of Justice. He was released on Saturday after an open sit-in by dozens of families of the victims.
© 2023 AFP
