Nasrallah rejects claims Hezbollah had arms in Beirut port

Secretary General of Lebanon’s Hezbollah resistance movement Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah has urged an impartial investigation into the blast that rocked Beirut on Tuesday.

Speaking in a televised speech on Friday, Nasrallah said those responsible for the deadly disaster had to be held to account regardless of their affiliations.

Nasrallah called for the military to conduct a transparent investigation into how the highly explosive material was left in the port and ignited.

He stressed that the probe should have neither political nor sectarian motives.

The powerful explosion on Tuesday took place at port warehouses storing highly explosive material, specifically ammonium nitrate, commonly used in both fertilizer and bombs, killing 154 people and injuring a whopping 5,000 others.

Describing the blast as a massive humanitarian and national catastrophe, the Hezbollah chief called on all the Lebanese to unite to overcome the ordeal.

He also dismissed as “injustice” media speculation in the early hours of the tragedy that Hezbollah had stored missiles in the port, adding that those accusations aimed to incite the Lebanese people against the resistance group.

"We have nothing in the port: not an arms depot, nor a missile depot nor missiles nor rifles nor bombs nor bullets nor ammonium nitrate," he said.

Nasrallah rejected the claims, and said those media outlets that spread the allegations had had political motivations and sought to incite a civil war in Lebanon.

Nasrallah denied Hezbollah has a presence in the port, claiming the Shia movement knows more about Israel's Haifa than the facility in Beirut.

"They wanted to blame Hezbollah for all of the death, destruction and terror caused by the explosion," said Nasrallah.

"This is unfair. Is this freedom of speech? There are those among our people, Hezbollah's people, who are martyrs of the Beirut port explosion."

The Hezbollah chief also expressed the resistance group’s readiness to help all the victims of the explosion. “We are ready to shelter the homeless families and to provide them with alternative housing,” he said.