Businessmen with ties to Assad linked to Beirut port blast cargo

Businessmen with ties to Assad linked to Beirut port blast cargo

The company used to ship a huge stockpile of ammonium nitrate to Beirut port, where it caused a devastating explosion last August, has been linked to three influential businessmen with ties to Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, a new investigation has found.The revelations about Savaro Limited – a London shelf company that was deregistered at Companies House on Tuesday – have amplified suspicions that Beirut had always been the cargo's intended destination, and not Mozambique, its official endpoint.They also for the first time raise the possibility that the detonation of 2,750 tonnes of nitrate in Beirut may have been a bi-product of Syrian officials' attempts to source nitrate to use in weapons.An investigation by the Lebanese film-maker Firas Hatoum, which aired this week on local television network Al-Jadeed, drew links between Savaro and three figures who had been central to efforts to bolster Assad since the earliest months of the Syrian war.George Haswani, Mudalal Khuri and his brother Imad are joint Russian-Syrian citizens who have all been sanctioned by the United States for supporting the Syrian leader's war effort. Companies linked to Haswani and Imad Khuri shared a London address with Savaro, which bought the nitrate in 2013. The official destination