The head office of the BAC Consulting KFT company in Budapest, Hungary on Sept. 18. Taiwanese company Gold Apollo’s president told reporters that the pagers involved in recent explosions in Lebanon were designed and built by BAC Consulting, which had licensed Gold Apollo’s brand and trademark two years ago.Janos Kummer/Getty Images
The mystery over how thousands of pagers used by the Hezbollah paramilitary group exploded deepened on Wednesday, when the Hungarian government said a local company had been wrongly cited as the builder of the pagers that killed at least 12 people and injured about 2,800 in Lebanon.
The pager attack on Tuesday was followed a day later by simultaneous explosions in the Mideast country of walkie-talkies – two-way radios – and other devices used by Hezbollah. Those attacks killed at least 20 people and injured more than 450, according to Lebanon’s Health Ministry.
Regarding the pagers, Zoltan Kovacs, spokesman for the cabinet office of the Hungarian government, said in a tweet that the “company in question is a trading intermediary, with no manufacturing or operational site in Hungary … and the referenced devices have never been in Hungary.”
His statement was published after numerous media sites said the pagers, which some reports said were detonated by the Israeli intelligence services, were manufactured by a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo. On Wednesday, Gold Apollo’s president, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters the devices were designed and built by BAC Consulting, a company registered in Budapest. He said BAC had licensed Gold Apollo’s brand and trademark two years ago.
BAC appears to be a shell company. The company’s website is no longer available but the archived version listed Cristiana Arcidiacono-Barsony of Budapest as its founder and CEO. Italy’s Corriere della Sera national newspaper reported that she was of Italian origin.
Her LinkedIn page says she is involved in strategic planning, business consulting and other services, and mentions BAC at the top of her “experience” section. In an interview with NBC News, she confirmed that BAC had worked with Gold Apollo but did not make the pagers. “I am just the intermediate,” she said.
Balint Bardi, a Hungarian freelance journalist, told The Globe and Mail that he visited the BAC site on Wednesday morning and saw two police officers enter the offices. He said they were inside for only about five minutes and made no comment to reporters when they left the building.
A Wednesday article in the Hungarian news site telex.hu published a report, without citing named sources, that the pagers were supplied by a Bulgarian company based in Sofia.
Lebanese soldiers stand guard as their colleagues prepare to detonate a walkie-talkie that was found at the parking of the American University Hospital, in Beirut, Lebanon, on Sept. 18.Hassan Ammar/The Associated Press
The death toll from Tuesday’s simultaneous pager-device explosions is expected to rise from the 12 already reported by Lebanon’s Health Minister. Two of the fatalities were young children. Of the roughly 2,800 people injured, some of them were hurt severely. Fourteen people were injured in similar blasts in Syria, according to Britain-based campaign group Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
Images of the destroyed walkie-talkies examined by Reuters on Wednesday showed an inside panel labelled “ICOM” and “made in Japan.” According to its website, ICOM is a Japan-based radio communications and telephone company.
Israeli officials have so far declined to comment on the mass attack. Speaking to troops on Wednesday, Israeli Defence Minister Yoav Gallant made no mention of the pager explosions but praised the work of Israel’s security services and said “we are at the start of a new phase in the war.”
Opinion: The Lebanon pager attacks are an escalation toward a war that few want
The unprecedented pager attack triggered numerous theories about the explosions. Some reports said that small amounts of explosives, perhaps pentaerythritol tetranitrate, were planted in the devices somewhere along their supply chain and set off by a signal that appeared to be coming from Hezbollah’s leadership. Other reports said it was the batteries in the pagers that exploded when they became superheated, though the likelihood of thousands of batteries bursting from excessive heat at the same moment seemed remote.
One of Italy’s top security experts, Umberto Rapetto, a former commander of the high-tech crime unit of the Guardia di Finanza, or Financial Guard, the semi-military national police force within the Ministry of Economy and Finance, said the pager attacks had a Mission Impossible nature about them. But he played down the reports the explosives might have been planted somewhere around their supply chain.
He told The Globe he believed Hezbollah itself planted explosives in the pagers as a security measure. “If a Hezbollah member were captured with his pager, his captors could examine the communication history stored in the devices,” he said. “To avoid this risk, Hezbollah must be able to render the devices unusable in a hurry.”
He said it is possible that Israel’s intelligence agencies intercepted, or were leaked, the destruction codes for each device. “They could then send the codes to those thousands of devices all at once to the pagers’ network,” he said.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres condemned the pager and walkie-talkie attacks and called for restraint from both Hezbollah and Israel. He suggested the attacks may have been planned as a prelude to a broader Israeli military campaign against Lebanon and Hezbollah.
“Obviously the logic of making all these devices explode is to do it as a pre-emptive strike before a major military operation,” Mr. Guterres told the media.