A Norwegian citizen who owned a company that allegedly supplied pagers to Lebanon went missing after the explosions, writes the British newspaper Daily Mail.
Earlier, Taiwanese pager manufacturer Gold Apollo said the batch of pagers that detonated in Lebanon was produced by Budapest-based company BAC Consulting Kft. under license. The Hungarian government claimed the company was a middleman and the pagers were never located in the country. Bulgarian company Norta Global Ltd. was also reported to have been involved in the transaction.
According to the publication, the owner of Norta Global is a 39-year-old Norwegian of Indian origin. Rinson Yosi (Rinson Jose).
Yossi is believed to have left on Tuesday on a pre-planned business trip. However, the management of his main employer, Norwegian media conglomerate NHST, has been unable to contact him since then and he turned to the Norwegian security service on Wednesday afternoon, the paper said.
The Oslo police announced the following day that they had “launched a preliminary investigation into the information that had come to light.”
As noted, there is currently no reason to believe that the Norwegian citizen had any knowledge of the secret operation to plant explosives in pagers.
Communications equipment, including pagers and walkie-talkies, was detonated in different parts of Lebanon on September 17 and 18. According to official figures, 32 people were killed and more than 3,000 injured. It is still not known what caused the simultaneous explosion of thousands of devices. Hezbollah and the Lebanese authorities blamed Israel for the incident. Israeli authorities have yet to confirm or deny their involvement.
