At about 3:30 p.m. local time on Tuesday, as people shopped for groceries, sat in cafes or drove cars and motorcycles in the afternoon traffic, the pagers in their hands or pockets started heating up and then exploding — leaving blood-splattered scenes and panicking bystanders.

Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said Wednesday that it authorized its brand on the AR-924 pagers used by the Hezbollah group, but the devices were produced and sold by a company called BAC.

Gold Apollo’s founder said the company did not make the pagers used in the explosions in Lebanon. They were manufactured by a company in Europe that had the right to use the Taiwanese firm’s brand.

Sean Moorhouse, a former British Army officer and explosive ordnance disposal expert, said videos of the blasts suggested a small explosive charge — as small as a pencil eraser — had been placed into the devices. They would have had to have been rigged prior to delivery, very likely by Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, he said.

Elijah J. Magnier, a Brussels-based senior political risk analyst, said he spoke with Hezbollah members who had examined pagers that failed to explode. What triggered the blasts, he said, appeared to be an error message sent to all the devices that caused them to vibrate, forcing the user to click on the buttons to stop the vibration. The combination detonated a small amount of explosives hidden inside and ensured that the user was present when the blast went off, he said.

Israel has killed Hamas members in the past with booby-trapped cellphones, and it’s widely believed to have been behind the Stuxnet computer virus attack on Iran’s nuclear program in 2010.

Hezbollah fighters began using pagers in the belief they would be able to evade Israeli tracking of their locations, two sources familiar with the group’s operations told Reuters this year.

APNEWS report

Reuters report

The child Bilal Kanj ascended to martyrdom after succumbing to injuries sustained in the terrorist zionist attack in Lebanon yesterday.
Ata’a Al-Dirani has also ascended to martyrdom after succumbing to her injuries, bringing the total number of martyrs who have ascended since yesterday’s attack to 11, including a woman, a medical worker, and two children, with nearly 3,000 injured – RNN.

Al Mayadeen