Firm in U.S. ally Taiwan says it did not make pagers used in Lebanon explosions

HONG KONG — An electronics manufacturer in Taiwan said Wednesday that it did not make the pagers used by members of the militant group Hezbollah that exploded simultaneously across Lebanon on Tuesday, killing at least nine people.

More than 2,750 others were injured in the blasts, according to Lebanon’s health ministry, including Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. In a statement on Wednesday, Iran-backed Hezbollah said there would be a “severe reckoning” over the blasts, for which it blamed Israel without providing evidence.

Israel has not commented directly on the explosions.

Images of the destroyed pagers showed that they bore stickers from Taiwan-based Gold Apollo, Reuters reported. The company’s founder and president, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters on Wednesday that the pagers were made by another company licensed to use its brand.

“There is an agent in Europe whom we have cooperated with for three years, they are the agent for all of our products,” Hsu said at the company’s offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei, adding that he had the contracts to prove it.

“We are not a big company, but we are a responsible company that cares about our products,” he said.

In a statement, Gold Apollo identified the other company as the Hungary-based BAC. The company is authorized to used Gold Apollo’s logo for product sales in certain regions, “but the design and manufacturing of the products are entirely handled by BAC,” the statement said.

BAC did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Reached by phone on Wednesday, a spokesperson for Gold Apollo declined to comment further, citing the ongoing investigation.

The Ministry of Economic Affairs in Taiwan, a Beijing-claimed island that depends heavily on the United States for its security, said Wednesday that Gold Apollo exported pagers primarily to European and American markets. It a statement, it said there had been no reports of explosions related to those products and that there were no records of the company exporting pagers directly to Lebanon.

“Was this batch of goods actually modified? … Did another manufacturer produce them and simply label them with the Apollo brand? This part is still under investigation by the authorities,” a ministry spokesperson told NBC News.

The explosions on Tuesday come amid rising concern that tensions between Israel and Lebanon could spiral into all-out war. Israel and Hezbollah, which is based in Lebanon and opposes Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip, have been engaged in cross-border attacks since the start of the Israel-Hamas war last October, displacing thousands of people in both countries.

Lebanon’s foreign ministry condemned what it called an “Israeli cyber attack,” saying that it would lodge a complaint with the U.N. Security Council.

Jeanine Hennis-Plasschaert, the U.N. special coordinator for Lebanon, said Tuesday that the explosions marked “an extremely concerning escalation in what is an already unacceptably volatile context.”

State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said Tuesday that the U.S. was “not aware of this incident in advance” and not involved in it.

Pagers are favored by members of Hezbollah who avoid using cellphones for fear that Israel could use them to track and monitor them. Lebanese officials warned all citizens on Tuesday to stay away from their wireless communication devices pending further notice.

Hezbollah said it was investigating the explosions and that there would be a “severe reckoning that the criminal enemy must face for the massacre it committed on Tuesday against our people, our families and our fighters in Lebanon.”

The group said earlier that “a girl and two brothers” were among those killed by the explosions, some of which appeared to have been captured on closed-circuit TV video and shared on social media. Muhammad Mahdi, the son of Ali Ammar, a Hezbollah member of Parliament, was also reportedly killed.

Hsu of Gold Apollo said he also felt he had been victimized and was considering filing a lawsuit.

“I am a businessman,” he said. “How did I get involved in this attack?”