Iran port explosion: Customs back to normal as victims' families set to receive compensation
Authorities at Iran's Shahid Rajaee port said that customs procedures were 'back to normal' on Tuesday after a large explosion and fire on Saturday killed at least 70 people and wounded 1,000 others.
Ninety per cent of the storage and containers for loading and offloading are operational, the state news agency Irna reported.
The Chief Justice of Hormozgan province, Mojtaba Ghahremani, said families of the victims will receive financial compensation in the coming 48 hours.
'The names of 25 victims whose identities have been identified have been given to insurance companies,' the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported him as saying, adding that the remaining victims' families will receive the same treatment once they have been identified.
In a bid to resume operations, employees at the port returned to work with visible bruises, Irna said.
Only one pier of the port's 23 suffered heavy damage as a result of the explosion, Irna said.
Meanwhile an official at the regulatory Central Insurance of Iran said an assessment of the coverage has been done and damage to vehicles will be compensated.
The port of Shahid Rajaee lies near the major coastal city of Bandar Abbas on the Strait of Hormuz, a waterway through which one-fifth of global oil output passes.
The explosion took place on the same day as indirect US-Iran nuclear talks which were held in Oman on Saturday.
State news outlets however warned against jumping to assumptions on the cause of the incident, given its timing.
Hormozgan provincial governor Mohammad Ashouri ruled out sabotage.
'The set of hypotheses and investigations carried out during the process indicated that the sabotage theory lacks basis or relevance,' he told state television on Monday.
Instead, Interior Minister Eskandar Momeni blamed the explosion on 'negligence'.
– With reporting from wires
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