Japanese company dismisses making exploding walkie-talkies: Report

“There’s no way a bomb could have been integrated into one of our devices during manufacturing. The process is highly automated and fast-paced, so there’s no time for such things,” Yoshiki Enomoto, a director at Icom, told Reuters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Japan on Thursday.

Icom has noted it halted production of the radio models identified in the attack a decade ago and that most of those still on sale were counterfeit.

“If it turns out to be counterfeit, then we’ll have to investigate how someone created a bomb that looks like our product. If it’s genuine, we’ll have to trace its distribution to figure out how it ended up there,” Enomoto added.

Lebanon’s director general of civil aviation has issued a new directive banning passengers from carrying pagers and walkie-talkies on board any aircraft, state-run news agency NNA has reported.

The ban applies to cargo, checked, and carry-on luggage passing through Beirut Rafic Hariri International Airport, and airport security will confiscate any such devices found.

The new rule is effective immediately and will be enforced until further notice.

Lebanon’s Health Minister Firass Abiad said at a news briefing in Beirut that at least 32 people have been killed and thousands injured in the back-to-back coordinated blasts.

On Tuesday, some 4,000 pagers exploded over the course of an hour. A day later, more explosions of handheld devices, including walkie-talkie radios, mobile phones, laptops and even solar power cells, took place.

Abiad stated that more than 300 patients are in intensive care, and 400 require surgeries and other treatments.

The explosions on Wednesday involved “larger and bigger devices that caused more damage”, he added, resulting in wounds that involve “internal bleeding, injuries to the abdomen and other parts of the body, including brain haemorrhages”.