The destruction of the 120,000-tonne capacity structure at the port, the main entry point for food imports, meant buyers must rely on smaller private storage facilities for their wheat purchases with no government reserves to fall back on.

Kuwait’s ambassador to Lebanon, Abdulaal al-Qenaie, said in comments to local radio VdL at the weekend that the silo was first built in 1969 with a Kuwaiti development loan.

The Gulf monarchy will now rebuild the silo so it remains a symbol of “how to manage relations between two brotherly countries that respect each other,” Qenaie was cited as saying.

The port explosion killed at least 180 people, injured thousands and wrecked swathes of the Lebanese capital, pushing the government to resign.

The now-caretaker economy minister, Raoul Nehme, has reassured the public there would be no flour or bread crisis in Lebanon, which buys almost all its wheat from abroad.

Plans for another grain silo in Lebanon’s second largest port Tripoli were shelved years ago due to a lack of funding, a United Nations official, port official and regional grain expert told Reuters earlier this month.

Humanitarian aid has poured into Lebanon. But foreign donors have made clear they will not bail out the state without reforms to tackle entrenched corruption and negligence.

Gulf Arab states who once gave Lebanon financial support have grown weary in recent years of the Iran-backed Hezbollah’s expanding role in state affairs.

— Reporting for Reuters by Ghaida Ghantous and Ellen Francis.

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There are many unanswered questions surrounding last week’s huge, deadly blast in the Lebanese capital, but ownership should be among the easiest to resolve.

Clear identification of ownership, especially of a cargo as dangerous as that carried by the Moldovan-flagged Rhosus when it sailed into Beirut seven years ago, is fundamental to shipping, the key to insuring it and settling disputes that often arise.

But Reuters interviews and trawls for documents across 10 countries in search of the original ownership of this 2,750-tonne consignment instead revealed an intricate tale of missing documentation, secrecy and a web of small, obscure companies that span the globe.

“Goods were being transported from one country to another, and they ended up in a third country with nobody owning the goods. Why did they end up here?” said Ghassan Hasbani, a former Lebanese deputy prime minister and opposition figure.

Those linked to the shipment and interviewed by Reuters all denied knowledge of the cargo’s original owner or declined to answer the question. Those who said they didn’t know included the ship’s captain, the Georgian fertilizer maker who produced the cargo and the African firm that ordered it but said it never paid for it.

The official version of the Rhosus’ final journey depicts its voyage as a series of unfortunate events.

Shipping records show the ship loaded ammonium nitrate in Georgia in September 2013 and was meant to deliver it to an explosives maker in Mozambique. But before leaving the Mediterranean, the captain and two crew members say they were instructed by the Russian businessman they regarded as the ship’s de facto owner, Igor Grechushkin, to make an unscheduled stop in Beirut and take on extra cargo.

The Rhosus arrived in Beirut in November but never left, becoming tangled in a legal dispute over unpaid port fees and ship defects. Creditors accused the ship’s legal owner, listed as a Panama-based firm, of abandoning the vessel and the cargo was later unloaded and put in a dockside warehouse, according to official accounts.

The Beirut law firm that acted for creditors, Baroudi + Associates, did not respond to requests to identify the cargo’s original legal owner. Reuters was unable to contact Grechushkin.

The empty ship eventually sank where it was moored in 2018, according to Lebanese customs.

The Rhosus’ final movements are under fresh scrutiny after the ammonium nitrate caught fire inside the warehouse and exploded last week, killing at least 158 people, injuring thousands and leaving 250,000 people homeless.

Among the still-unanswered questions: who paid for the ammonium nitrate and did they ever seek to reclaim the cargo when the Rhosus was impounded? And if not, why not?

The cargo, packaged in large white sacks, was worth around $700,000 at 2013 prices, according to an industry source.

Uninsured

Reuters inquiries have raised numerous red flags.

Under international maritime conventions and some domestic laws, commercial vessels must have insurance to cover events such as environmental damage, loss of life or injury caused by a sinking, spill or collision. Yet the Rhosus was uninsured, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The ship’s Russian captain, Boris Prokoshev, said by phone from his home in Sochi, Russia, that he had seen an insurance certificate but could not vouch for its authenticity.

Reuters was unable to obtain a copy of the ship’s documents.

The Mozambican firm that ordered the ammonium nitrate, Fábrica de Explosivos Moçambique (FEM), was not the cargo owner at the time because it had agreed to only pay on delivery, according to its spokesman, Antonio Cunha Vaz.

The producer was Georgian fertilizer maker Rustavi Azot LLC, which has since been dissolved. Its owner at the time, businessman Roman Pipia, told Reuters he had lost control of the Rustavi ammonium nitrate plant in 2016. U.K. court documents show that the firm was forced by a creditor to auction off its assets that year.

The factory is now run by another firm, JSC Rustavi Azot, which also said it could not shed light on the cargo owner, according to the plant’s current first deputy director, Levan Burdiladze.

FEM said it had ordered the shipment through a trading firm, Savaro Ltd., which has registered companies in London and Ukraine but whose website is now offline.

A visit to Savar’s listed London address on Monday found a Victorian terraced house, with a locked and barred door, near the fashionable bars of Shoreditch. No one responded to knocks on the door.

Reuters contacted U.K.-registered Savaro director Greta Bieliene, a Lithuanian based in Cyprus. She declined to answer questions.

A source familiar with the inner workings of Savaro’s trading business said it sold fertilizer from ex-Soviet Union states to clients in Africa.

Ukraine-based businessman Vladimir Verbonol is listed as director of Savaro in Ukraine, according to Ukrainian corporate data base You Control. Reuters was unable to contact Verbonol for comment.

The Russian

As grief and anger over the blast turn to civil unrest in Beirut, there are signs the Lebanese government’s promised investigation has already turned its sights back to the Rhosus and Grechushkin, the man the crew considered as its owner.

A security source said Grechushkin was questioned at his home in Cyprus last Thursday about the cargo. A Cypriot police spokesman said an individual, whom he did not name, had been questioned at the request of Interpol Beirut.

The Rhosus arrived in Beirut in November 2013 with a leak and in generally poor condition, captain Prokoshev said. It had already been beset with problems.

In July 2013, four months before docking in Beirut, the ship was detained for 13 days by port authorities in Seville, Spain, after multiple deficiencies including malfunctioning doors, corrosion on the deck area and deficient auxiliary engines were found, according to shipping data. It resumed sailing after inspection firm Maritime Lloyd issued a cargo ship safety construction certificate, which would have involved a survey of the ship, the data showed.

Teimuraz Kavtaradze, an inspector at Georgia-based Maritime Lloyd, which does not rank among the most prominent and widely-used inspection firms, said he could not confirm whether or not the firm had provided any inspection documents to port officials in Seville. He said he was working for Maritime Lloyd in 2013 but that other staff and the management had since changed.

Seville port officials were not immediately available for comment. Paris MoU, a body of 27 maritime states under whose authority the detention was carried out, confirmed in an email that the vessel was detained and inspected in Seville.

Moldova, where the Rhosus is registered, lists the owner of the ship as Panama-based Briarwood Corp., a certificate of ownership seen by Reuters shows. Reuters was not immediately able to identify Briarwood as a Panamanian registered company. Panama’s maritime authorities did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

The ship’s charterer, Teto Shipping Ltd., is based in the Marshall Islands and was dissolved in 2014, according to International Registries, which says it provides shipping registry services to the Marshall Islands.

Igor Zaharia, the director of Moldova’s Naval Agency, said Grechushkin was Teto Shipping’s director.

The Rhosus’ captain passed Reuters an email address that he and the crew had been using for Teto Shipping, but requests for comment to the same address went unanswered. The captain said he regarded Grechushkin and Teto as the same entity.

— Reporting for Reuters by Maria Vasilyeva, Lisa Barrington and Jonathan Saul; additional reporting by Michele Kambas in Nicosia and Limassol, Cyprus; Maria Tsvetkova and Polina Devitt in Moscow, Victoria Waldersee in Lisbon, Tsvetelia Tsolova in Sofia, Margarita Antidze in Tbilisi, Tom Perry in Beirut, Alexander Tanas in Chisinau, Elida Moreno in Panama City, Guy Faulconbridge and Luke Baker in London and Nathan Allen in Madrid.

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The reinforced concrete walls and underground rooms were his shelter for many days during Lebanon’s 1975-1990 civil war.

He used to tell his family that he was more worried for them than himself when he set out to work each morning.

At 5:30 p.m. that Tuesday, Hasrouty called his wife, Ibtissam, saying he would be sleeping at the silos that night because a shipment of grains was arriving and he could not leave.

He told her to send him a blanket and pillow.

She has not heard from him since.

Tuesday’s explosion in the port of Beirut, the biggest ever to hit the city, destroyed the silos, killed at least 158 people and injured more than 6,000. It left an estimated 300,000 Lebanese effectively homeless as shockwaves ripped miles inland.

The health ministry on Saturday said 21 people were still missing.

Officials have said the blast was caused by 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate, a substance used in fertilizers and bombs, which had been stored for six years in a nearby warehouse without adequate safety measures.

The government has promised to hold those responsible to account, but residents are seething with anger.

Hasrouty’s family believe that he and six of his colleagues are somewhere under the silos and they are holding out hope that they are alive.

They say the rescue response has been too slow and disorganized and that whatever chance there was for finding them alive is being lost.

The family says that despite giving the authorities the exact location of where he was believed to have been at the time of the explosion, the rescue effort did not start until 40 hours later.

At their home in Beirut, the family has gathered every day, anxiously awaiting information.

“These people who are missing are not just numbers,” says Elie, 35, Hasrouty’s son.

“We need to highlight the mediocrity of management of this disaster, of this situation, how bad it is managed… not to repeat such a horrible disaster and horrible management.”

Hasrouty, whose own father worked at the same silos for 40 years, was dedicated to his job, his family says.

His daughter Tatiana, 19, flits between resignation and hope.

“We did not even get a chance to say goodbye,” she says. “But we are still waiting for them… to all come back.”

— Reporting for Reuters by Yara Abi Nader; writing by Ayat Basma.

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Raoul Nehme told Reuters a day after Tuesday’s devastating explosion that Lebanon needed reserves for at least three months to ensure food security and was looking at other storage areas.

The explosion was the most powerful ever to rip through Beirut, a city torn apart by civil war three decades ago. The economy was already in meltdown before the blast, slowing grain imports as the nation struggled to find hard currency for purchases.

“There is no bread or flour crisis,” the minister said. “We have enough inventory and boats on their way to cover the needs of Lebanon on the long term.”

He said grain reserves in Lebanon’s remaining silos stood at “a bit less than a month” but said the destroyed silos had only held 15,000 tonnes of the grain at the time, much less than capacity which one official put at 120,000 tonnes.

Beirut’s port district was a mangled wreck, disabling the main entry point for imports to feed a nation of more than six million people.

Ahmed Tamer, the director of Tripoli port, Lebanon’s second biggest facility, said his port did not have grain storage but cargoes could be taken to warehouses two km away.

Alongside Tripoli, the ports of Saida, Selaata and Jiyeh were also equipped to handle grain, the economy minister said.

“We fear there will be a huge supply chain problem, unless there is an international consensus to save us,” said Hani Bohsali, head of the importers’ syndicate.

U.N. agencies are meeting on Wednesday to coordinate relief efforts for Beirut, Tamara al-Rifai, a spokeswoman for the Palestinian refugee agency UNRWA, told Reuters from Amman.

“People are extremely poor, it’s increasingly difficult for anyone to buy food and the fact that Beirut is the largest port in Lebanon makes it a very bad situation,” she said. “We are looking at Tripoli, but it is a much smaller port.”

Reserves of flour were sufficient to cover market needs for a month and a half and there were four ships carrying 28,000 tonnes of wheat heading to Lebanon, Ahmed Hattit, the head of the wheat importers union, told Al-Akhbar newspaper.

Lebanon is trying to transfer immediately four vessels carrying 25,000 tonnes of flour to the port in Tripoli, one official told LBCI news channel.

An Egyptian-operated ship was unloading 5,000 tonnes of Ukrainian wheat at the port at the time of the blast, but the cargo is “in good condition,” the shipping company’s operations director told Reuters Wednesday.

Two Syrian crew members aboard the Mero Star were seriously injured in the blast and others were wounded, Farid Hashem said.

— Reporting for Reuters by Ellen Francis, Tom Perry and Dahlia Nehme in Beirut, Maha El Dahan in Dubai and Nadine Awadalla in Cairo, additional reporting by Jonathan Saul in London and Stephen Farrell in Jerusalem.

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The minister also told local media that Lebanon will import wheat and added that the country currently has enough wheat until they begin importing it.

A huge explosion Tuesday in port warehouses near central Beirut killed more than 75 people, injured almost 4,000 and sent shockwaves that shattered windows, smashed masonry and shook the ground across the Lebanese capital.

Lebanon’s President Michel Aoun was quoted Tuesday as saying it was “unacceptable” that 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate had been stored for six years at the port, allegedly without safety measures.

For comparison, the U.S. domestic terror attack that killed over 165 people in Oklahoma City in 1995 was carried out using about two tonnes of ammonium nitrate mixed with motor fuel.

Regulations have in place in Canada since 2008 tightening access to ammonium nitrate fertilizer and other potential “explosives precursors.”

Farmers and other buyers of ammonium nitrate must provide identification when purchasing, and are prohibited from reselling the chemical.

— Reporting for Reuters by Alaa Swilam. Includes files from Glacier FarmMedia Network staff.

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The seeds, including samples of wheat, barley and grasses suited to dry regions, have been requested by researchers elsewhere in the Middle East to replace seeds in a gene bank near the Syrian city of Aleppo that has been damaged by the war.

“Protecting the world’s biodiversity in this manner is precisely the purpose of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault,” said Brian Lainoff, a spokesman for the Crop Trust, which runs the underground storage on a Norwegian island 1,300 km from the North Pole.

The vault, which opened on the Svalbard archipelago in 2008, is designed to protect crop seeds — such as beans, rice and wheat — against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease.

It has more than 860,000 samples, from almost all nations. Even if the power were to fail, the vault would stay frozen and sealed for at least 200 years.

The Aleppo seed bank has kept partly functioning, including a cold storage, despite the conflict. But it was no longer able to maintain its role as a hub to grow seeds and distribute them to other nations, mainly in the Middle East.

Grethe Evjen, an expert at the Norwegian Agriculture Ministry, said the seeds had been requested by the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA). ICARDA moved its headquarters to Beirut from Aleppo in 2012 because of the war.

ICARDA wants almost 130 boxes out of 325 it had deposited in the vault, containing a total of 116,000 samples, she told Reuters. They will be sent once paperwork is completed, she said.

It would be the first withdrawal from the vault, she said. Many seeds from the Aleppo collection have traits resistant to drought, which could help breed crops to withstand climate change in dry areas from Australia to Africa.

Syria’s four-year civil war has killed an estimated 250,000 people and driven more than 11 million from their homes, with 7.6 million displaced within Syria.

— Alister Doyle is an environment correspondent for Reuters in Oslo.

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