A week after thousands of pagers and walkie-talkies targeting Hezbollah members were detonated in Lebanon, how the devices were seized and handed over to the Shiite militia remains a mystery.
Beyond the number of victims (39 dead, including two children, and more than 3,000 wounded), only one thing is certain: meticulous organisation and logistics, combined with absolute discretion, were necessary to carry out this unprecedented operation. Even if Israel has neither confirmed nor denied its involvement, there is little doubt about the Jewish State’s responsibility. According to the New York TimesAccording to Israeli intelligence sources, three front companies were used to mitigate Hezbollah surveillance.
The first is a Hungarian consulting company founded in 2022, BAC Consulting. On Tuesday, September 17, minutes after the first explosions, images of the remains of the pagers circulated on social media. A logo is clearly visible: that of the Taiwanese company Gold Apollo. Its leader, Hsu Ching-kuang, is quick to distance himself. He explains that he sold the right to use his logo to BAC Consulting and that it was the Hungarian company that was responsible for the explosion. “produce and sell” The pagers. However, it does not explain why the exact model that exploded on the streets of Lebanon appeared on its website. On Thursday, the manager was questioned by the Taiwanese prosecutor, as well as by Teresa Wu, an employee of a company suspected of having acted as an intermediary between BAC Consulting and Gold Apollo. The pagers caught were not made in Taiwan » said the Taiwanese Minister of Economy the next day.
A mysterious Hungarian company
The idea of producing booby traps in Hungary quickly took hold. Journalists rushing to the address of BAC Consulting find themselves in a small beige building a few kilometres from the centre of Budapest, where the company has no office, only a mailbox. The CV of its managing director, founder and, undoubtedly, only employee, Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, is dizzying. She speaks seven languages, has a PhD in particle physics and studied at the prestigious London School of Economics. She is also proud to have worked with the European Commission, the CNRS and UNESCO, and to have advised companies around the world.
But some of the entries on this impressive resume are significantly embellished, according to the Reuters news agency. On his lengthy LinkedIn profile, now deleted, he claims his “diverse experiences” him “allows for the management of far-reaching and complex environmental, political and development programmes”. We searched in vain for details about BAC Consulting’s activity on the website.
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