Taiwanese pager maker alarmed by link to Lebanon attacks

The race to search out the maker of Lebanese explosive pagers has taken an sudden flip – turning to a little-known Taiwanese firm till this morning.

Tuesday’s bombings concentrating on members of the armed group Hezbollah killed a minimum of 12 folks and injured almost 3,000 others, triggering a geopolitical storm within the Center East.

Xu Jingguang, founding father of crisis-hit Taiwan’s Golden Apollo, flatly denies his firm had something to do with the assaults.

As an alternative, Mr. Koh mentioned he licensed his trademark to a Hungarian firm known as BAC Consulting to make use of the Gold Apollo identify on their very own pagers. Makes an attempt by the BBC to contact the BAC have to this point been unsuccessful.

“You take a look at the photographs from Lebanon,” Mr. Xu advised reporters outdoors the corporate’s places of work on Wednesday. “They have no ‘Made in Taiwan’ markings on them, these pagers aren’t made by us!”

Gold Apollo’s places of work are situated in a big new enterprise park in an unassuming suburb of Taipei, Taiwan’s capital.

They give the impression of being similar to any of the 1000’s of small buying and selling firms and producers that make up a big a part of the island’s economic system – aside from the 2 policemen standing on the entrance, able to fend off a swarm of squatting journalists and tv staff personnel.

The partitions of Gold Apollo’s workplace are coated with posters of the corporate’s merchandise — a montage of small, boxy plastic units and small grey LCD screens. They’re all pagers.

Till this morning, the corporate’s web site had a devoted web page touting its advantages and usefulness. However when information broke that Gold Apollo was allegedly the supply of apparatus used within the assaults in Lebanon, the positioning went offline.

Mr Xu mentioned pagers manufactured by BAC Consulting had been used within the Lebanese assaults. He advised reporters that his firm signed an settlement with BAC Consulting three years in the past.

He added that the switch of funds from BAC was “very unusual”. He advised reporters there have been issues with funds by the Center East, however gave no particulars.

Initially, BAC hoped to purchase pagers from Gold Apollo and promote them in Europe, he mentioned. However a couple of 12 months later, they got here up with a brand new plan to construct their very own pager and licensed the Gold Apollo identify.

Gold Apollo’s assertion mentioned: “We solely present model trademark licensing and aren’t concerned within the design or manufacturing of the product.”

However the truth that he now has a staff from the Taipei Bureau of Investigation in his workplace with numerous cardboard containers reveals that the Taiwanese authorities aren’t fully reassured.

Nonetheless, Mr. Xu’s assertion that his firm didn’t manufacture the units is smart.

Taiwan’s manufacturing system is a posh maze of small firms, lots of which do not truly make the merchandise they promote. They could personal the model identify, mental property rights and have analysis and design departments. However a lot of the particular manufacturing is outsourced to factories in China or Southeast Asia.

Pagers aren’t precisely cutting-edge know-how both—there are lots of firms around the globe able to making them.

They’re small radio receivers with LED screens that obtain and show messages. Within the Eighties and Nineteen Nineties, digital pagers had been thought-about the newest know-how and had been utilized by tens of tens of millions of individuals. Earlier than cell telephones, firms used pagers to ship textual content messages to area staff.

However over the previous 20 years, the rise of smartphones has pushed pagers to the brink of extinction. They’re now a distinct segment gadget in locations like hospitals — an affordable and dependable method to ship messages to medical doctors and nurses even when different communication strains are down.

Starting within the late 2000s, Gold Apollo additionally started to maneuver away from digital pagers and commenced producing different short-range radio gear—significantly for eating places. The corporate’s most profitable product proper now could be a disc that’s handed to clients as soon as they place an order in meals courts and eating places – the disc lights up and vibrates when their order is prepared.

Gold Apollo’s model identify (as a dependable pager producer) possible helped promote the pagers that had been finally bought by Hezbollah.

However there are nonetheless extra questions than solutions on this outstanding story.

We all know subsequent to nothing about BAC Consulting – who’s or was behind it?

If the pagers used within the Lebanese assaults weren’t made by Golden Apollo, who made them and the place?