Alisha Rahaman Sarkar
The Independent / September 26, 2024
Prosecutors question four people associated with company whose label was on exploding devices.
Four people have been questioned as witnesses in the investigation into a Taiwanese company linked to pagers that detonated in Lebanon last week, prosecutors said.
At least 39 people, including children, were killed and 3,000 injured after hundreds of pagers and walkie talkies exploded across Lebanon in what is widely suspected to have been an Israeli attack.
Israeli president Isaac Herzog appeared to deny his country’s involvement in the attack. He told Sunday Morning with Trevor Phillips on Sky News: “First of all, I reject out of hand any connection to this, or that source of operation.”
How or when the electronic devices were weaponised and remotely detonated remains under investigation, which has led prosecutors in Taiwan to look at the roles of companies at home as well as in Bulgaria, Norway and Romania.
Manufacturing labels on the exploded pagers indicated they were made by Gold Apollo, but the Taiwanese company denied making them. “The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,” company president Hsu Ching-Kuang said.
He added that Gold Apollo had licensed BAC Consulting, a company in Hungary to which the devices were subsequently traced, to use its brand.
But University College London (UCL) graduate Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, the CEO of BAC Consultancy, said she was just a link in the supply chain and did not make the pagers.
Mr Hsu said his company had no knowledge of the pagers being rigged to explode.
Although the Taiwanese government also claimed that the pagers were not made on the island, prosecutors in Taipei opened an investigation into Gold Apollo.
A spokesperson for the Shilin District Prosecutors Office said a current and a former employee of the company have since been questioned as witnesses. “We are processing this case expeditiously and seeking resolution as soon as possible,” the spokesperson said
They declined to name the people questioned or confirm whether any more employees would be interrogated.
“The two helped clarify the case and the whole case is under intensive investigation.”
Mr Hsu and Teresa Wu, the sole employee of a company called Apollo Systems, were questioned last week, the spokesperson said.
The investigators reportedly also conducted searches at four locations linked to the company.
A Lebanese security source claimed that Hezbollah had ordered 5,000 pagers from Gold Apollo a few months earlier. The group had reportedly asked members in February to stop using mobile phones, warning they could be tracked by Israeli intelligence.
Israeli operatives allegedly “manufactured” the pagers and had them sent to Lebanon as a “part of an elaborate ruse” instead of just tampering with the devices at some stage, The New York Times claimed in a report.
Alisha Rahaman Sarkar is a news reporter with The Independent
