Site of explosion at the Pizza Secret restaurant in Beirut on Tuesday 30 April 2024. (Credit: Zeina Antonios/L'Orient Today)
BEIRUT – There was only one way in — and so only one way out — of Pizza Secrets, a restaurant in Beirut's Bechara al-Khoury area.
When a gas leak caused an explosion and uncontrollable fire on Tuesday in the kitchen of the newly opened Italian food shop, employees at the back of the building had no way to escape. Nine people suffocated and died, on the eve of Labor Day, in a workplace incident that politicians and members of the community alike say could have been avoided.
The youngest of them was only 16 years old and the oldest was barely twice that.
The nine victims, as named by a source from Internal Security, were:
Imad Choucair, 25, Lebanese
Walid Dankour, 25, Lebanese
Aya Marmar, 26, Lebanese
Hadi Chehab, 20, Lebanese
Hussein Harmoush, 32, Lebanese
Majd Ramadan, 25, Syrian
Yousef Al-Abbas, 21, Syrian
Abdullah Abdullah, 16, Syrian
Ali Jad, 19, Egyptian
Site of explosion at the Pizza Secret restaurant in Beirut on Tuesday 30 April 2024. (Credit: Zeina Antonios/L'Orient Today)
Sick children left without fathers
Walid Dankour was buried in Kfar Bebnine, a village in northern Lebanon, on Wednesday morning. “He was still a child,” said Ahmad Haidar, the village mukhtar.
“He was only 25 years old and had a sick child who is in need of urgent medical treatment. Dankour was collecting donations to treat him.” His wife — now widow — is seven months pregnant, the mukhtar added.
“They brought him last night to his village and he was buried this morning,” Haidar said. “His parents are still shocked and inconsolable. His mother has been crying non-stop since she found out that her son had been killed.”
Hussein Harmoush was 32 years old, from Hezine, in the Bekaa, and lived in Beirut. He left behind two daughters: a two-year-old and a three-year-old, said Harmoush's uncle, who goes by Abu Rabih. The three-year-old has been in and out of the hospital, he added, struggling with a nervous system disease.
Hussein was an employee at the gas company “Natgaz,” and had been working a double shift that afternoon delivering gas. "He used to work day and night to meet the needs of his family and cover the hospital bills for his daughter,” Abu Rabih said. According to him, Hussein had decided to add more gas canister deliveries to the schedule that day, so that he and his team could take the next day — Labor Day — as a holiday, and “spend it with their families.”
Another employee, his friend, was also one of the victims, according to Abu Rabih. L’Orient Today contacted the company but was unable to get any further information about their employees.
‘I want to know what happened inside’
Hadi Chehab was originally from Baraachit near Nabatieh but lived in Hay al-Sellom, a neighborhood in Beirut’s southern suburbs. He was buried in Beirut on Wednesday. Chehab was 20 years old and had started working at Pizza Secrets two months ago, his mother, Batoul Issa, told L'Orient Today.
“The blood of my son will not be in vain,” she said. “We deserve to know how they died. I want to know what happened inside, not just outside,” she said, referring to the videos showing torrents of flame spewing from the restaurant’s entrance.
Hadi had been living with his mother, his sister, and his five-year-old brother.
Aya Marmar, the only woman of the nine victims, will be buried Friday in Ansar, her hometown near Nabatieh.
“Now, we call her the ‘Flower of April,’” said Rima, Aya’s maternal aunt. She described the 26-year-old as “the pillar of the home.”
"Her father, a member of Hezbollah, was injured in the eye [during the Israeli occupation of the South, before 2000]. She became his eyes.”
Aya studied graphic design and worked at Pizza Secrets “because she didn’t find a job in her domain,” her aunt said. “She didn’t need to work, but she wanted to, so she found this job that doesn’t resemble her.”
The family is “in shock,” but they will do everything they can to bring her justice, Rima said.
Twenty-five-year-old Imad Choucair was from Mais al-Jabal, in southern Lebanon, but grew up in Beirut’s southern suburbs. He has been buried in Beirut’s Tayouneh neighborhood, according to Abdel Choucair, a relative and the mayor of Mais al-Jabal. He added that Imad had only started working at Pizza Secrets five days before the explosion.
“The entire neighborhood was [at the funeral] to show their sympathy toward the family,” he said. Imad had two older siblings and held a diploma in hotel management.
‘No excuse’
An employee from Pizza Secrets' other branch, in Haret Hreik, told L’Orient Today he knew all the victims from the Bechara al-Khoury branch and defended the restaurant, saying the gas delivery company was at fault. “It’s not negligence on the part of the restaurant,” he said.
One employee who was working front-of-house managed to escape and lead two customers out of the building. The Civil Defense and firefighting teams confirmed the incident and expressed that "the tragedy could have been avoided" with proper safety measures, such as an emergency exit.
“The restaurant was newly opened. There is no excuse for it not having [an emergency] exit,” said one member of Civil Defense who requested anonymity, as he was not authorized to speak to the media.
The Beirut Fire Brigade issued a statement asserting that the cause of the explosion at Pizza Secrets is still under investigation, contradicting earlier reports attributing the incident to work being done welding gas pipes.
Four people were wounded in the explosion and are currently being treated in hospitals around Beirut.
At Hotel Dieu, medical personnel said that the victims brought to their facility had suffered severe burns and asphyxia leading to cardiac arrest. Attempts to resuscitate them were unsuccessful.
Fires and explosions caused by gas leaks are common in Lebanon. In January, a gas leak caused an explosion at the AMI restaurant in the Beirut Souks in Downtown Beirut, with no injuries. In August 2021, an explosion triggered by welding work being done in a water heater factory in southern Beirut killed four people. Two weeks prior, amid a worsening fuel crisis in Lebanon, a tanker holding tens of thousands of liters of illegally stored fuel discovered in Akkar exploded as desperate residents flocked to fill up their tanks, killing 28 people and wounding dozens of others.