Who made the pager explosion? A messy global trail emerges behind the deadly explosions in Lebanon
HONG KONG – An electronics manufacturer in Taiwan said on Wednesday that it did not make the pagers used by members of the militant group Hezbollah that exploded simultaneously in Lebanon on Tuesday, killing at least nine people.
More than 2,750 others were injured in the blasts, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. In a statement on Wednesday, Iran-backed Hezbollah said there would be a “severe reckoning” over the blasts, for which it blamed Israel without providing evidence.
Israel has not commented directly on the explosions.
Images of the destroyed pagers showed they carried stickers from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, Reuters reported. The company’s founder and chairman, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters on Wednesday that the pagers were made by another company licensed to use its brand.
“There is an agent in Europe with whom we have cooperated for three years, they are the agent for all our products,” Hsu said at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwan city of New Taipei, adding that he had the contracts to prove it. him
“We are not a big company, but we are a responsible company that cares about our products,” he said.
In a statement, Gold Apollo identified the other company as Hungary-based BAC. The company is authorized to use the Gold Apollo logo for the sale of products in certain regions, “but the design and manufacture of the products are entirely managed by BAC,” the statement said.
BAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reached by phone Wednesday, a Gold Apollo spokesman declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economy said on Wednesday that Gold Apollo exported pagers mainly to the European and American markets. In a statement, he said there had been no reports of explosions linked to those products and that there were no records of the company exporting pagers directly to Lebanon.
“Was this batch of goods really modified? … Did another manufacturer produce them and simply label them with the Apollo brand? This part is still under investigation by the authorities,” a ministry spokesman told NBC News.
Tuesday’s blasts come amid growing concern that tensions between Israel and Lebanon could spiral into all-out war. Israel and Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon and opposes Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, have been engaged in cross-border attacks since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last October, displacing thousands of people in both countries.
Lebanon’s foreign ministry condemned what it called an “Israeli cyberattack,” saying it would file a complaint with the UN Security Council.
Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the UN special coordinator for Lebanon, said on Tuesday that the explosions marked “an extremely worrying escalation in what is already an unacceptably volatile context”.
State Department spokesman Matthew Miller said Tuesday that the United States “was not aware of this incident in advance” and not involved in it.
The pagers are favored by Hezbollah members who avoid using cell phones for fear that Israel could use them to track and monitor them. Lebanese officials on Tuesday warned all citizens to stay away from their wireless communication devices pending further notice.
Hezbollah said it was investigating the blasts and that there would be a “severe reckoning that the criminal enemy must face for the massacre it carried out on Tuesday against our people, our families and our fighters in Lebanon.”
The group said earlier that “a girl and two brothers” were among those killed in the blasts, some of which appeared to have been captured on closed-circuit TV video and shared on social media. Muhammad Mahdi, the son of Ali Ammar, a Hezbollah member of Parliament, was also killed.
Hsu of Gold Apollo also said he had been victimized and was planning to file a lawsuit.
“I’m a businessman,” he said. “How did I participate in this attack?”