Five people have been killed and more than 700 injured in a huge explosion at the port of Bandar Abbas in southwestern Iran, according to official Iranian media.
The head of the Iranian emergency services said four people had died in the blast. A spokesperson for the emergency services earlier said 516 had been injured.
A video distributed by the Mehr news agency showed surveillance footage of the moment of the explosion, which appears to have occurred in a warehouse at the port. Other footage showed helicopters dropping water at the site of the fire ignited by the explosion.
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.
The region’s governor, Mohammad Ashouri Taziani, said injured people were being transferred to Bandar Abbas medical centers and the fire had been contained. 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.”
State broadcaster IRIB said the explosion took place in the chemical and sulfur area of the port.
A government spokeswoman, Fatemeh Mohajerani, said it would take some time to establish the cause of the explosion – “but so far what has been determined is that containers were stored in a corner of the port that likely contained chemicals which exploded. But until the fire is extinguished, it’s hard to ascertain the cause.”
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.