Exploding pager trail runs from Taiwan to Hungary

TAIPEI: A Taiwanese pager company denied on Wednesday that it had produced devices that wounded thousands of Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon when they exploded, an audacious attack that raised the prospect of a full-scale war between the Iran-backed group and arch-foe Israel, Reuters has reported. Gold Apollo said that the devices were made under licence by a company called BAC, based in Hungary’s capital, Budapest.

Israel’s spy agency Mossad has a long history of pulling off sophisticated attacks on foreign soil. It planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters.

Jordan’s Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi accused Israel of pushing the Middle East to the brink of a regional war by orchestrating a dangerous escalation on many fronts. “Hezbollah wants to avoid an all-out war,” said Mohanad Hage Ali of the Carnegie Middle East Centre. “It still wants to avoid one. But given the scale, the impact on families, on civilians, there will be pressure for a stronger response.”

The senior Lebanese security source said that Hezbollah had ordered 5,000 pagers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.

However, Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said that the pagers used in the explosion were made by a country in Europe that was named as BAC. “The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” Hsu told reporters at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.

The stated address for BAC Consulting in Hungary’s capital Budapest was a peach building on a mostly residential street in an outer suburb. The company name was posted on the glass door on an A4 sheet. A person at the building who asked not to be named said BAC Consulting was registered there but did not have a physical presence.

The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AR-924. Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking. The source said that the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level”. Israeli officials did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment. “The Mossad injected a board inside of the device that has explosive material that receives a code. It’s very hard to detect it through any means,” explained the source, who added that around 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, activating the explosives simultaneously.

Another security source told Reuters that up to three grams of explosives were hidden in the new pagers and had gone “undetected” by Hezbollah for months.