Twenty-five people were killed and about 800 injured in a massive explosion at a port in southern Iran.
According to Iran’s state-run IRNA news agency, the blast occurred at Shahid Rajaei Port in southern Iran’s Bandar Abbas city near the Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil output passes.
The port’s customs office said in a statement carried by state television that the explosion probably resulted from a fire that broke out at the hazardous and chemical materials storage depot.
A massive explosion, possibly caused by ammonium nitrate the same highly-explosive chemical which caused the Beirut explosion in 2020, has rocked the port of Bandar Abbas this morning in Southern Iran. Iranian media is reporting over 400 injures, while the death toll is still… pic.twitter.com/TrVkR70Zzy
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) April 26, 2025
Images from the official news agency IRNA showed rescuers and survivors walking along a wide boulevard carpeted with debris after the blast at Shahid Rajaei, more than 1,000km (620 miles) south of Tehran.
Flames engulfed a truck trailer and blood stained the side of a crushed car, while a helicopter dropped water on massive black smoke clouds billowing from behind stacked shipping containers.
Debris was spread over a wide area and many buildings at the port complex were badly damaged, according to state media. Windows within a radius of several kilometers were shattered, they said.
Some reports said people were trapped in the wreckage of a building that was reduced to rubble.
Citing local emergency services, state TV reported that “hundreds have been transferred to nearby medical centres”, while the provincial blood transfusion centre issued a call for donations.
The region’s governor, Mohammad Ashouri Taziani, said injured people were being transferred to Bandar Abbas medical centers. The port has been closed and maritime operations suspended, according to state media.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian has ordered an investigation into the causes of the incident. He wrote on X that the interior minister had been sent to the region to “examine the dimensions of the accident.”
“After receiving initial reports and analyzing the possible causes of the incident,” Pezeshkian emphasized the need to conduct “a comprehensive assessment of the causes of the incident,” as soon as possible to prevent “the recurrence of such incidents in the future.”
Shahid Rajaee is a large facility for container shipments, covering 2,400 hectares (around 5,900 acres). It handles 70 million tons of cargo annually, including oil and general shipping. It has nearly 500,000 square meters (5.4 million square feet) of warehouses and 35 shipping berths.
The explosion came several months after one of Iran’s deadliest work accidents in years. The coal mine blast in September, caused by a gas leak, killed more than 50 people at Tabas in the east of the country.
Saturday’s explosion came amid high-level Iran-US talks in Oman on Tehran’s nuclear programme, with both sides reporting progress.
