A Taiwanese company denied responsibility on Tuesday for manufacturing and distributing explosive pagers bearing its name that have killed at least nine people and injured thousands more in Lebanon.
According to media reports citing Lebanese and U.S. officials, Hezbollah has ordered more than 3,000 electronic pagers from Gold Apollo, a New Taipei City-based maker of wireless communications equipment.
Hezbollah accuses Israel of tampering with the pagers and causing them to explode.
The company’s founder, Xu Ching-kuan, told reporters on Wednesday that the pager was made by Budapest, Hungary-based BAC Consulting, which has licensed the Gold Apollo logo and brand. He said the company was not involved in the design or manufacturing of the product.
Su told a news conference that irregularities in BAC’s wire transfers to Gold Apollo were raising concerns. He did not provide further details, but defended the decision to grant the license to BAC.
“We were very careful when working with them,” Su said. “If signing a contract is going to bring us business, why wouldn’t we accept it?”
Gold Apollo, which was founded in 1995 and has about 30 employees in Taiwan, said it had held an emergency meeting and hosted government officials in its offices following news that some of the devices used in the attack had been identified as Gold Apollo’s AR924 model, according to a statement on its website.
A Gold Apollo employee who answered the phone, surnamed Lin, declined to give his full name or title, said the company does not fill pager orders directly from Hezbollah and that BAC handles most of the device sales from customers in the Middle East.
BAC works with different countries to sell telecommunications products internationally, including to new markets for Asian companies, according to its website. The company and its founder, Cristiana Arcidiacono-Barthony, whose name is listed on the website, did not respond to emails seeking comment.
It is unclear how the unprecedented attack was carried out, but security experts said the pagers transported could have been embedded with explosives and detonated remotely. Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement in the incident.
Hezbollah, an Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militia and one of Lebanon’s most powerful political parties, has fought Israel for decades and recently fired rockets into northern Israel in support of Hamas, the Palestinian militant group in the Gaza Strip that accuses Israel of illegally occupying Palestinian land.
Israel and Hamas have been at war since October. On the 7th, a Hamas surprise attack killed more than 1,200 Israelis and took 250 hostages. Gaza authorities estimate that 40,000 Palestinians have been killed in the conflict, which Israel responded with an invasion of Gaza.
The war in Gaza reignited conflict between Israel and Hezbollah last October, with rocket fire displacing thousands on both sides of the Israeli-Lebanese border.
Hezbollah has begun using pagers to communicate in recent months to avoid Israeli surveillance of its cell phones.
Times special correspondent Xinyun Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.
