By Staff Reporter
ISLAMABAD: An explosion at Qatar’s Ras Laffan Industrial City, the world’s largest liquefied natural gas hub, killed 13 workers, including a Pakistani, and wounded 66 others on Sunday evening, the country’s energy minister said on Monday, as the Gulf state works to restore output halted by the US-Iran war.
Qatar’s Minister of State for Energy Saad al-Kaabi, who also serves as chief executive of state-owned QatarEnergy, said the blast stemmed from a “technical malfunction” and was “an accident and not sabotage or hostile in nature.” Twelve of the dead were Indian nationals and one was Pakistani, he told reporters.
“We announce the tragic loss of 13 lives of our people who hold Indian and Pakistani nationalities,” al-Kaabi said, adding that those injured held Qatari, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Kenyan, Ghanaian, Tanzanian, Nigerian and Nepalese nationalities. None of the 66 wounded were in life-threatening condition, he said.
India’s embassy in Doha confirmed the toll of its nationals and said it was working closely with Qatari authorities to assist affected families and arrange for the repatriation of the deceased. Pakistan’s embassy similarly expressed condolences and said it had deployed staff to help Pakistani nationals, providing emergency contact numbers for community members seeking assistance.
QatarEnergy said the explosion occurred during the restart of operations at the Barzan local gas supply facility inside Ras Laffan, where production had been shut down since December 2025 for scheduled maintenance. Workers had resumed operations only two days before the blast. By late Sunday night, emergency teams had brought the resulting fire under control.
The explosion reverberated across Doha, some 64 kilometres to the south, where AFP journalists heard the blast. Another reporter positioned roughly 20 kilometres from the site witnessed bright orange flames and a rising column of smoke.
Al-Kaabi moved quickly to contain economic concern over the incident, saying it would have no impact on Qatar’s LNG exports, no effect on domestic gas supply and no environmental consequences. An investigation has been launched into the cause, he said.
“We have to take it in stride and move on and learn from it,” al-Kaabi said.
The explosion comes at a delicate moment for Qatar’s energy industry. Ras Laffan, which has an annual LNG production capacity of 77 million metric tons, suffered significant damage during the US-Iran war, when Iranian missile strikes in March targeted two of its key gas-processing units and cut roughly 17 percent of the country’s LNG export capacity.
Al-Kaabi told Reuters at the time that repairs to those units would take between three and five years. The war also forced QatarEnergy to evacuate approximately 10,000 workers from offshore rigs and onshore processing plants, though the company reported no injuries during that attack.
Qatar has been among the most severely affected Gulf producers by the conflict. With no alternative export routes, the closure of the Strait of Hormuz effectively trapped around 20 percent of the world’s LNG supply in the Gulf before some shipments began to move again as conditions eased.
Restarting LNG operations is a technically demanding and time-consuming process. The liquefaction procedure — which cools natural gas to approximately minus 162 degrees Celsius to convert it into liquid form — requires a deliberately slow cooldown sequence to avoid thermal shock, and individual processing trains must be brought back online one at a time rather than simultaneously.
Al-Kaabi drew a clear distinction between Sunday’s accident and the geopolitical pressures the country continues to face, describing the regional security situation as a separate “geopolitical, military issue” that should not be conflated with an internal industrial incident.
Qatar hosts a major United States military base on its territory.
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