By Ben Blanchard
NEW TAIPEI, Taiwan (Reuters) – Taiwan’s Gold Apollo said on Wednesday that the pagers used in the detonations in Lebanon had not been made by it but by a company called BAC that has a license to use its brand.
At least nine people were killed and nearly 3,000 injured when pagers used by Hezbollah members detonated simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday. According to a senior Lebanese security source and another source, explosives inside the units were planted by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back consistent with pagers made by Gold Apollo.
“The product was not ours. It was just that it had our brand on it,” Gold Apollo’s founder and president, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters at the company’s office in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.
The company said in a statement that the AR-924 model was manufactured and sold by BAC.
Gold Apollo authorized “BAC to use our brand for product sales in specific regions, but the design and manufacturing of the products is handled entirely by BAC,” the statement said.
Hsu previously said the company with the license was based in Europe but later declined to comment on BAC’s location.
He added that there had been problems with transfers from the company.
“The remittance was very strange,” he said, adding that payments had come through the Middle East. He did not elaborate.
Hezbollah fighters began using pagers in the belief they could avoid Israeli tracking of their locations, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.
Hsu said he did not know how the pagers could have been rigged to explode.
While Hsu met with reporters, police officers arrived at the company. Officials from Taiwan’s Ministry of Economy also visited Gold Apollo.
The ministry said in a statement that there was no record of the direct export of pagers from Taiwan to Lebanon.
Hsu also said Gold Apollo was a victim of the incident and planned to sue the licensee.
“We may not be a big company but we are a responsible company,” he said. “This is very embarrassing.”
(Reporting by Ben Blanchard; Writing by Miyoung Kim; Editing by Michael Perry and Edwina Gibbs)