Israel was involved in the pager terror attack in Lebanon; the operation had been planned for at least 15 years, a US intelligence source told ABC News. According to the channel’s interlocutor, front companies associated with Israeli intelligence agents were involved in the preparations. These companies served as a front for the real pager manufacturer.
ABC reports that it tried to contact Hungarian company BAC Consulting, which was contracted to produce Taiwanese brand Gold Apollo pagers (the ones that exploded in Lebanon), but received no response to its queries. A Hungarian government official told the broadcaster that there were never any pagers in the country and that the company was “a reseller with no manufacturing or operations centre in Hungary”.
On September 17, a bombing of pagers, many of which belonged to members of the Hezbollah group, took place. More than 4,000 people were injured and at least 32 people were killed, including children. This was the first such attack. The next day, September 18, explosions of radios and other equipment in Lebanon killed 25 people and injured more than 600.
As The New York Times (NYT) wrote, citing sources, Israel has created at least three front companies for the production of pagers, one of them being BAC Consulting. In fact, the devices were manufactured by Israeli intelligence agents.
Each was implanted with an explosive weighing between 28 and 56 grams, placed next to the battery, and the pagers also had built-in switches to remotely activate the explosives after receiving a message similar to those typically sent by Hezbollah leaders. The devices were programmed to beep for several seconds before exploding.
Israel did not claim responsibility for the attack. Hezbollah Secretary General Hassan Nasrullah On September 19, he said that the Jewish state, by carrying out the explosions of equipment in Lebanon, “crossed all red lines”; its actions amounted to a declaration of war;
