A Taiwanese electronics manufacturer has said that a tiny European company made the pagers linked to the deadly attack targeting Hezbollah members in Lebanon on Tuesday, as a fresh wave of walkie-talkie explosions rocked parts of the country on Wednesday and questions swirled over how the devices made it there.
At the non-descript offices of Gold Apollo on the outskirts of the Taiwanese capital on Wednesday, the founder of the company, Hsu Ching-kuang, vehemently denied making the pagers bearing its brand name that were used in Tuesday’s massive assault – later pointing, without evidence, to the Budapest-registered BAC Consulting firm.
“The design and manufacturing of the products are solely the responsibility of BAC,” a Gold Apollo statement said. Hsu said that his firm had established a relationship with the Hungarian company about three years ago.
The allegations raise further questions as to who manufactured the devices and just how they made their way into Hezbollah’s pockets.
Hungarian authorities denied Gold Apollo’s suggestion late Wednesday, saying that the Budapest-registered company “is a trading intermediary” with no manufacturing sites in the country. “The referenced devices have never been in Hungary,” Hungary’s State Secretary for International Communication Zoltan Kovacs said.
CNN has attempted to reach BAC through the website that Gold Apollo gave to reporters, and at the address listed for its office, located in a residential area of Budapest.
On Wednesday morning, a receptionist working at the building told CNN that BAC Consulting rents a space at the address but has never physically been to the building. A woman living in an upstairs apartment said that she hardly sees anyone coming to the building to work.
Plainclothes police arrived on site when CNN was there. Kovacs said that an investigation had been opened and that Hungary was “cooperating with all relevant international partner agencies and organizations.”
CNN also reached out to BAC Consulting chief executive Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono through an email address and phone number listed for her, but has not received a response. NBC News reported that Bársony-Arcidiacono had confirmed in a phone call that her company worked with Gold Apollo, but denied making the pagers, saying, “I am just the intermediate.” CNN could not confirm her statement.
Meanwhile, scrutiny remains on Gold Apollo as multiple photos from the Tuesday attacks appear to show the damaged devices bearing the company’s trademark.
CNN has learned that the audacious attack, which has heightened tensions in a region already on edge even further, was a joint operation between Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, and the Israeli military. The Lebanese government condemned the attack as “criminal Israeli aggression.”
The New York Times reported, citing unnamed sources, that Israel hid explosives inside the devices and added a switch in each one, which was later used to detonate them remotely.
The production of pagers is highly regulated in Taiwan due to their transmission functions, with authorities conducting regular inspections, a senior Taiwanese security official told CNN on Wednesday.
Gold Apollo’s pagers had met all standards and nothing unusual was found, according to the official, who did not provide further details about the inspection.
Gold Apollo has been making a wide range of devices from pagers – wireless devices that can send messages without an internet connection commonly used by emergency services and hospitals – to buzzers used by restaurants since its 1995 founding, according to the company’s website.
It works with distributors around the world to sell its products, the firm said in a previous media report, once touting itself as one of the largest suppliers of walkie-talkies and pagers in the US and Europe and counting intelligence agencies and emergency services among its clients.
Exploding pagers
According to social media images from Lebanon, at least one pager shown at the scene was identified as the Gold Apollo AR924 model, billed as a compact waterproof device which uses a rechargeable lithium battery, according to product information on the company’s website.
Gold Apollo claimed in its statement that the AR924 pager was produced and sold by BAC, which was covered by a licensing agreement. The company has declined to show the contract to CNN.
Hsu said that early in its relationship, the European partner only imported the Taiwanese company’s pager and communication products. Later, BAC told Gold Apollo it wished to make its own pagers and asked for the right to use its brand, he added.
Hsu said Gold Apollo had encountered at least one anomaly in its dealings with the Hungarian company, citing a wire transfer that took a long time to clear.
“We may not be a large company, but we are a responsible one,” he said. “This is very embarrassing.”
On BAC Consulting’s website, it describes “Bridging Technology and Innovation from Asia,” as one of several projects it is working on. “We develop international technology cooperation” among countries for the sale of telecommunication products. This cooperation entails scaling up a business from Asia to new markets e.g. developing countries,” it states.
BAC Consulting was founded in 2022, according to company records from the Hungarian Ministry of Justice. The company, which says it has worked with clients from a range of sectors, saw its total assets increase nearly tenfold from 2022 to 2023, rising from $36,466 to $322,670 in just a year, according to the same records.
Gold Apollo shipped about 260,000 pagers from the island, mostly to the United States and Australia, between the start of 2022 to August 2024, according to Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs.
Taipei has no record of Gold Apollo pagers being shipped to Lebanon, the ministry said in a statement, adding it will continue to investigate.
Low-tech devices
The AR924 model is not available for sale in Taiwan, according to the senior Taiwanese security official. Taiwan’s telecom companies ended pager services in 2011, due to a sharp decline in usage amid the growing popularity of mobile phones.
The AR924 is not available in the United States either, a representative at the company’s US distributor told CNN.
The low-tech nature of pagers seemed to be a selling point to Hezbollah, an Iran-backed militant group based in Lebanon.
At the start of the year, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah called on members and their families in the south of the country, where fighting with Israeli forces across the border has raged, to dump their cellphones, believing Israel could track the movement of the Iran-backed terror network through those devices.
Hsu founded Gold Apollo with 100 million New Taiwan dollars ($3.1 million) in capital in 1995, according to Taiwan’s corporate registry.
At the time, pagers – known locally as “BB call” – were trending on the island. But phone companies’ termination of pager services prompted the firm to shift its focus from the domestic market to overseas, he told Taiwan’s Commonwealth Magazine in an interview in 2011.
Gold Apollo soon dominated pager markets in Western countries, the magazine reported. Most of the demand for its pagers came from intelligence agencies, firefighting services and defense departments in the US and Europe, including the FBI, the report said.
Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to include new developments.
Gianluca Mezzofiore, Tamara Qiblawi, Pallabi Munsi, Oren Liebermann and Kylie Atwood contributed to this report.
