The New York Times has reported that Israel hid explosives inside a batch of pagers ordered from Gold Apollo and destined for Hezbollah.
Multiple images from Lebanon shared on social media appear to show damaged Gold Apollo pagers.
But Gold Apollo founder and chairperson Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters on Wednesday that his firm had signed a contract with a European distributor to use the Gold Apollo brand.
Hsu added the distributor, which he later named as BAC in a company statement, established a relationship with Gold Apollo about three years ago.
At first, the European company only imported Gold Apollo’s other pager and communication products, he said. Later, the company told Gold Apollo they wanted to make their own pagers and asked for the right to use the Taiwanese company’s brand, he said.
Hsu said Gold Apollo had encountered at least one anomaly in its dealings with the distributor, citing a wire transfer that took a long time to clear.
Taiwan has no record of Gold Apollo pagers being shipped to Lebanon or the Middle East, a senior Taiwanese security official told CNN on Wednesday.
Gold Apollo shipped about 260,000 pagers from Taiwan, mostly to the United States and Australia, the official told CNN.
A number of the Lebanese resistance movement Hezbollah as well as civilians were killed and thousands more wounded after wireless communication devices, known as pagers, exploded in different locations across the country on Tuesday.
The Lebanese Health Ministry said at least nine people were killed and 2,800 others wounded in the explosions that were first reported in the southern suburbs of Beirut.
Most of the injuries from Tuesday’s pager explosions in Lebanon have been to the face and hands, the ministry added.
The Reuters news agency, citing informed sources, reported that Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Hezbollah before the detonations on Tuesday.
The sources told Reuters that the plot appears to have been many months in the making. The beepers were brought into the country earlier this year.
Reuters quoted a senior Lebanese source as saying 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 noted.
They added that 3,000 of the pagers exploded when a coded message was sent to them, simultaneously activating the explosives.
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.
