Chinese chemicals intended to provide fuel for Iran’s ballistic missile program are suspected to be the cause of the explosion at the Shahid Rajaei port.
A massive explosion at a port in Iran has killed at least five people and injured more than 700 others.
The explosion at the Shahid Rajaei port on the Strait of Hormuz rocked the industrial area surrounding the facility on April 26 and sent large plumes of reddish-black smoke billowing into the sky.
The blast shattered windows within a wide radius and was heard on an island 16 miles south of the port, Iranian media said.
Leadership in Tehran has not yet offered an explanation for what caused the blast at the port, which is just outside of Bandar Abbas, but said that the explosion was not linked to the nation’s oil industry.
Mehrdad Hasanzadeh, a provincial disaster management official, told Iranian state media that emergency services were trying to reach the area while others were attempting to evacuate the site.
Hossein Zafari, a spokesperson for Iran’s crisis management organization, linked the explosion to poor storage conditions of chemicals that were in some of the port’s containers.
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It remains unclear what precisely triggered the explosion. However, the port was slated to receive two shipments of a component used in rocket fuel from China in recent months, first reported in January by the Financial Times.
The shipments each carried roughly 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate, a component used to create fuel for Iran’s ballistic missiles, according to a policy brief published in February by the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington-based think tank.
One of those vessels stopped in Bandar Abbas in February, according to publicly available maritime tracking data, though Iran hasn’t acknowledged taking the shipments.
Tracking data placed both ships off the coast of Bangladesh at the time of Saturday’s explosion.
The shipments in question were likely going to be used to create rocket fuel to replenish Iran’s missile stockpiles, which were depleted last year following Tehran’s launching of direct attacks on Israel in support of the terror group Hamas.
Communist China has long provided assistance to the Islamist regime in Tehran, helping the Middle Eastern power to skirt sanctions by trading infrastructure investments for Iranian oil.
China-based actors have also been charged by the U.S. Department of Justice in recent years with smuggling components to Iran needed for building weapons of mass destruction.
It remains unclear at this time what would have caused the fuel to explode. Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said earlier in the week that Iranian security services were on high alert to potential acts of sabotage and assassination.
Saturday’s explosion occurred while experts from the United States and Iran met in Oman to negotiate the details of a new agreement to limit Iran’s capacity to build a nuclear weapon.
Iran’s Interior Ministry is investigating the blast.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
