A report Thursday alleged that a Hungarian firm [
BAC Consulting, Budapest] that apparently supplied pagers used by Hezbollah was secretly set up by Israeli spies as part of a widescale operation that appeared to culminate this week when the devices exploded, killing several and maiming thousands of Hezbollah operatives and others in Lebanon and Syria.
The New York Times claimed that rather than merely managing to tamper with the devices at some stage of their production or distribution, Israel actually "manufactured them as part of an elaborate ruse."
The report was the latest to seemingly pull the covers back on what is widely believed to have been a secret Israeli operation that burst into the open Tuesday as thousands of devices blew up in Hezbollah strongholds.
According to the New York Times, the company supplied other firms with pagers as well, though only the ones transferred to Hezbollah were fitted with batteries that contained explosive materiel known as PETN.
"Authorities have confirmed that the company in question is a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary. It has one manager registered at its declared address, and the referenced devices have never been in Hungary," Zoltán Kovács [Hungarian government spokesman] posted Wednesday on X. He did not say where the pagers were manufactured.
Bulgaria, meanwhile, said it would investigate a third company linked to the sale of the pagers. The DANS state security agency said in a statement that it was working with the interior ministry to probe the role of a company registered in Bulgaria, without naming it.
Bulgarian media reports alleged that a Sofia-based company called
Norta Global Ltd had facilitated the sale of the pagers. Reuters was not immediately able to confirm the link to Norta, and company officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer that registered the company at an apartment block in Sofia did not respond to Reuters questions.
Images of the exploded walkie-talkies showed labels bearing the name of Japanese radio communications and telephone company
ICOM 6208.T and resembled the firm's model IC-V82 device.
The company, which says it manufactures all of its radios in Japan, said Thursday the model was manufactured and shipped to the Middle East from 2004 to 2014, but had not been shipped by the company since then. It said batteries for the devices were also no longer being manufactured.
The handheld radios were purchased by Hezbollah five months ago, around the same time as the pagers, a security source said.
The Osaka-based firm said its radio products were all manufactured by a single subsidiary in Wakayama, using only its own parts, with no overseas production.
The company has previously warned about counterfeit versions of its devices circulating in the market, especially discontinued models.
"A hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company," it said, referring to the devices that exploded Wednesday.
Source The Times of Israel
- "I already knew that the pagers were manufactured in Israel. However, the detonating device is totally separate and doesn't rely on the pager. It's triggered by a powerful satellite signal in space. The detonator has its own RF receiver and does not even need a battery. Those pagers would have exploded even without the batteries in. Israel demonstrated this by detonating solar energy systems today in Lebanon and those devices have no batteries or radio electronics like pagers and walkies-talkies. This newer technology allows Israel to simply embed these detonators in anything and not just electronics."
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