The president and founder of the Taiwanese company linked to pagers used by Hezbollah has been questioned by prosecutors and released, as the hunt for the origins of devices that detonated across Lebanon this week spreads across the globe.
Gold Apollo’s president, Hsu Ching-kuang, has said his company did not manufacture the pagers used in the attack on Tuesday, and that they were made by a Budapest-based company BAC Consulting KFT which has a licence to use its brand.
He was questioned in Taiwan on the same day that Icom, a Japanese communication equipment maker whose walkie-talkies are thought to have been detonated in a second wave of attacks on Wednesday, said the units used may have been a discontinued model containing modified batteries.
At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 wounded when pagers used by Hezbollah members detonated simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday, in an attack the Iran-backed group blamed on Israel. A day later, 25 people were killed and more than 450 wounded when walkie-talkies exploded in supermarkets, on streets and at funerals.
In Taiwan, Hsu declined to answer reporters questions as he left a Taipei prosecutors office late on Thursday. Prosecutors had also questioned a woman connected to a different company – according to local media – a representative connected to BAC Consulting KFT who had set up a company based in Taipei called “Apollo Systems”.
Apollo Systems was registered in April this year, and its listed address in Taipei’s Neihu district was among four locations searched by investigators, including Gold Apollo’s office in New Taipei.
“Our country takes the case very seriously,” said the prosecutors office from Taipei’s Shilin district in a statement Friday.
“We instructed the Investigation Bureau’s national security station to further interview two people from Taiwanese companies as witnesses yesterday.”
Taiwan’s government has said it is investigating what happened and police have made several visits to Hsu’s company, in a small, unassuming office in Taipei’s next door city of New Taipei.
On Friday morning Taiwan’s minister of economic affairs said he could say “with certainty” that the components used in the pagers were not made in Taiwan.
In Japan, handheld radio manufacturer Icom said the devices used in the attacks on Wednesday appeared to be their IC-V82 handheld radio, which had been exported overseas, including to the Middle East, between 2004 and 2014.
“We can’t rule out the possibility that they are fakes, but there is also a chance the products are our IC-V82 model,” Icom’s director, Yoshiki Enomoto, said on Wednesday, according to the Kyodo news agency. The firm sold about 160,000 units of the model in Japan and overseas before ending production and sales in 2014.
“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and 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 in a statement on its website. It added that products for overseas markets are sold exclusively through its authorised distributors, and that its export programme is based on Japanese security trade control regulations.
Icom said all of its radios are manufactured “under a strict management system” at a subsidiary production site in Wakayama prefecture in western Japan.
“No parts other than those specified by our company are used in a product,” it said. “In addition, all of our radios are manufactured at the same factory, and we do not manufacture them overseas.”
Hezbollah has vowed to retaliate against Israel, which has not claimed responsibility for the detonations. The two sides have been engaged in cross-border warfare since the Gaza conflict erupted last October.
Reuters contributed to this report
