Port probe back on track as Hajjar axes Oueidat ruling against Bitar

State Prosecutor Jamal al-Hajjar has re-allowed security and judicial authorities to cooperate with Beirut port blast investigator Judge Tarek Bitar, revoking ex-prosecutor Ghassan Oueidat’s ruling against him, state-run National News Agency reported on Monday.

Oueidat had in January 2023 charged Bitar with "rebelling against the judiciary" and slapped him with a travel ban while also summoning him for questioning. Moreover, Oueidat ordered the release of all suspects detained in connection with the blast, who were eventually allowed to walk free.

Oueidat ordered the "release of all those detained over the Beirut port explosion case, without exception" and banned them from travel, the document said. Back then Bitar called Oueidat’s move “a coup against the law,” noting that "only the judicial investigator has the right to issue release orders.”

Bitar had charged several high-level officials, including Oueidat, over the blast.

On February 7 this year, Bitar questioned two people. He had resumed his investigation in January, charging 10 people including security, customs and military personnel after a two-year hiatus in the probe into the August 4, 2020 ammonium nitrate explosion that killed more than 220 people, injured thousands and devastated swathes of Lebanon's capital.

Security sources initially suggested welding work could have started the fire that triggered the blast, but experts have since dismissed the theory as unlikely and an attempt to shift the blame off high-level failings.

The probe stalled two years ago after Hezbollah accused Bitar of bias and demanded his dismissal, and after officials named in the investigation filed a flurry of lawsuits against him.

The resumption of work comes with Hezbollah's influence weakened after its recent war with Israel and follows the election of a Lebanese president after a more than two-year vacancy.

Prior to February 8, Bitar had questioned defendants over the blast in December 2021.

Nobody has yet been held responsible for the blast, one of history's largest non-nuclear explosions.