Explosives were ‘planted inside pagers’ before they reached Hezbollah, sources say
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A senior Lebanese security source has told the Reuters news agency that Israeli agents planted a small amount of explosives inside 5,000 pagers ordered by Hezbollah, which detonated on Tuesday.
The plot appears to have been many months in the making, several sources told the agency.
Hezbollah has blamed Israel for Tuesday’s attacks, which killed nine people and injured thousands. The Israeli military has not yet commented.
The senior Lebanese source said the devices had been modified by Israel’s Mossad spy agency “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 said.
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.
Photos on social media appeared to show damaged Gold Apollo AP924 pagers, a model that was said to be brought into the country in the spring, but the Taiwanese manufacturer said it did not make those used in the detonations.
Taiwan’s Gold Apollo said the pagers used in the detonations were made by a company called BAC which has a licence to use its brand.
“The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it,’ Gold Apollo founder and president, Hsu Ching-Kuang, told reporters on Wednesday.
Hsu said did not know how the pagers could have been rigged to explode.
“We may not be a large company but we are a responsible one,” he said. “This is very embarrassing.”
