Multiple news outlets today are claiming that exploding pagers that injured thousands of people in a covert attack against Hezbollah were made by a Taiwanese company based in New Taipei City.
The New York Times reported that Israeli operatives hid explosive material in the Taiwan-made Gold Apollo pagers before they were exported to Lebanon via Iran. NYT cited American and other officials who had been briefed on the operation as the source for the information.
The claims arose after thousands of people were injured when their personal pagers exploded in an apparently coordinated attack, Tuesday, September 17. Reuters reported that at least 2,750 people were injured, and nine people died, citing figures from Lebanon’s health ministry.
According to Iranian news agency Tasnim, Iran commissioned Taiwanese manufacturer, Apollo Paging Electronics, to produce the pagers. The hardware and software were reportedly altered under Israeli intelligence supervision in Taiwan before being delivered to Iran. It is alleged that batteries used in the 5,000 devices acquired five months ago contained 20 grams of explosives.
The manufacturing company, Gold Apollo, is headquartered in New Taipei City’s Xizhi District. The company’s website early this morning was responding slowly and suffering sporadic outages, presumably due to much heavier demand than usual. Shortly after 9:00 am, the website began returning a “403 forbidden” error, suggesting it has been taken off-line or blocked.
Most of the pagers involved in the attack appear to be the Apollo Gold AP924.
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