Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, implicated as the supplier of the Hezbollah pagers that exploded on Tuesday in a seemingly coordinated attack on the Lebanese terrorist group, reportedly plans to file a lawsuit against the Hungarian licensee that purportedly manufactured the devices under its label.
Hundreds of Hezbollah members were injured and some killed on Tuesday when their pagers simultaneously exploded across Lebanon. At least nine people were reportedly killed in the attack, and some reported over 2,700 more were injured. Among them was Iranian Ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani, whose government must now explain why he was carrying a pager connected to Lebanese terrorists.
Hezbollah reportedly began using pagers this year at the urging of their leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who feared Israel would be able to track and target cell phones carried by his operatives. Nasrallah bragged that he was “blinding” the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) by switching from smartphones to pagers.
Alphanumeric pagers were once ubiquitous but now are a somewhat antiquated technology that still has its uses, especially in areas where cellular reception is unreliable. Australia’s ABC News felt obliged to write a “What Is a Pager?” article on Wednesday, even though Australia’s vast expanses of sparsely-populated wilderness are one of the places where using pagers makes sense.
From Hezbollah’s perspective, pagers are more secure than phones because they work by receiving radio signals, rather than being connected to the Internet. Pagers do not have to generate the sort of outgoing transmissions that cell phones do, so they cannot be easily tracked as cell phones can.
Soon after Nasrallah told his terrorists to lock their mobile phones in iron chests and bury them in the ground, Hezbollah ordered 5,000 units of the AR-924 model pager from Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese company whose founder Hsu Ching-kuang has taken credit for bringing pager technology back from the dead.
On Wednesday, Hsu acknowledged the exploding pagers carried his company’s brand. He denied any involvement with creating the deadly devices. Instead, he claimed a Budapest-based company called BAC Consulting manufactured Hezbollah’s pagers under license from Gold Apollo.
Hsu said an enigmatic Taiwanese woman known only as “Teresa” approached him three years ago with a deal to let BAC import pagers from Taiwan, and later to manufacture pagers under Gold Apollo’s trademark. He said they originally wanted to slap the Gold Apollo label on their own designs, but he convinced them to use his own popular pager models.
Hsu said he was under the impression that BAC would make pagers for European customers, and perhaps East Africa, but they never said anything about doing business in Lebanon. He said BAC paid his company from a “Middle Eastern bank account” that once encountered some “inconvenient” difficulties with transmitting funds to Gold Apollo’s Taiwanese bank.
“There was nothing in those devices that we had manufactured or exported to them,” he said of the pagers that exploded on Tuesday. He claimed there were some structural differences between BAC’s products and the pagers directly manufactured by Gold Apollo, including a chip incorporated in the BAC design that is not used by Hsu’s company.
“We only provide brand trademark authorization and have no involvement in the design or manufacturing of this product,” Gold Apollo said in a statement on Wednesday.
Taiwanese security officials told CNN on Wednesday they have no record of Gold Apollo shipping pagers to Lebanon or anywhere else in the Middle East. The company has exported about 260,000 pagers so far this year, with most of them shipped to the United States and Australia.
Records obtained from the Hungarian Ministry of Justice by NPR on Wednesday showed BAC Consulting was registered in May 2022 under a single owner named Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono. The company’s May 2024 balance sheet reported a positive balance of just over $320. The company reported $593,972 in revenue last year and claims about $9,000 in standing capital.
The Associated Press (AP) visited BAC’s listed address in Budapest on Wednesday and found a building in a residential neighborhood with “the names of multiple companies, including BAC Consulting, posted on pieces of paper on a window.”
Barsony-Arcidiacono has a LinkedIn profile that describes her as a “CEO, strategic adviser, and business developer,” with a link to BAC Consulting. She has elsewhere described herself as a “freelance expert in natural resources and sustainable development.”
Unlike Gold Apollo’s Hsu, Barsony-Arcidiacono does not appear to be taking questions from reporters at the moment, nor is BAC Consulting.
Hsu said on Wednesday he plans to sue BAC Consulting to restore his company’s reputation.
“We may not be a large company, but we are a responsible one. This is very embarrassing,” he said.
It is not yet clear whether BAC Consulting had anything to do with weaponizing the pagers, or indeed how and when this was accomplished. Israel’s defense and intelligence agencies have not taken formal responsibility for the pager bombing of Hezbollah.
