Taiwan Firm Gold Apollo Denies Producing Explosive-Packed Hezbollah Pagers – News18

Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo on Wednesday denied a report that it had produced hundreds of explosive-packed pagers used by Hezbollah members that simultaneously exploded.

“They are not our products from beginning to end. How can we produce products that are not ours?” company head Hsu Chin-kuang told reporters in Taipei after the New York Times reported that his company’s pagers were involved in the blasts.

Imported pagers

This came after multiple reports said Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by the Lebanese group months before Tuesday’s detonations. The operation was an unprecedented Hezbollah security breach that saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon, killing 11 people and wounding nearly 4,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.

Iran-backed Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, whose military declined to comment on the blasts. The plot appears to have been many months in the making. The senior Lebanese security source said the group had ordered 5,000 beepers from Gold Apollo, which several sources say were brought into the country earlier this year.

Earlier, Gold Apollo founder said the pagers used in the explosion were made by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taipei-based firm’s brand, the name of which he could not immediately confirm. “The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” he was quoted as saying by Reuters on Wednesday.

The senior Lebanese security source identified a photograph of the model of the pager, an AP924, which like other pagers wirelessly receive and display text messages but cannot make telephone calls. Hezbollah fighters have been using pagers as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to evade Israeli location-tracking. The senior Lebanese source told Reuters that the devices had been modified by Israel’s spy service “at the production level.” “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. Even with any device or scanner,” the source said.

(With agency inputs)