Hungarian company built Hezbollah’s exploding pagers, Taiwanese firm says

A Taiwanese company said the exploding pagers that injured thousands of people across Lebanon on Tuesday were actually manufactured in Hungary.

Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group and political party, claimed that Israel was behind the security incident that struck its members. The New York Times also reported, citing U.S. and other officials, that Israel hid explosives in the batch of detonated pagers.

The pagers, which went off simultaneously, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000, had branding consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese pager manufacturing firm.

But the Taiwan-based company said in a statement that the AR-924 model used in the attack was manufactured and sold by a Hungarian company called BAC Consulting, which had a license to use its brand on the pagers.

“According to the cooperation agreement, we authorize BAC to use our brand trademark for product sales in designated regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products are solely the responsibility of BAC,” Gold Apollo’s statement said. “Our company only provides the brand trademark authorization and is not involved in the design or manufacturing of this product.”

POLITICO did not receive a response when attempting to contact BAC on Wednesday morning.

The Taiwanese firm’s founder and president Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters that there had been problems with the company’s money transfers coming from BAC. “The remittance was very strange,” he said, according to Reuters, adding that the payments came through the Middle East, but without going into detail.