The pagers that blew up in Lebanon were modified long in advance

Iran's ambassador to Lebanon Mojtaba Amani lost an eye when his pager exploded on September 17. His other eye was seriously injured as well.

Photo: commons.wikimedia.org by Kevster, CC BY-SA 3.0

Hezbollah members' pagers were beeping for a few seconds before they blew up. Many assumed that they had to read something important, so people held their pagers close to their faces at the moment when the devices started exploding, The New York Times said with reference to its sources in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Israeli intelligence services modified the pagers that Hezbollah ordered from Taiwanese company Gold Apollo at the production stage. A circuit board with explosives was inserted into the devices when they were being produced. A coded message activated the devices and caused them to explode, Reuters said with reference to a source at Lebanese intelligence services.

Gold Apollo did not manufacture the pagers that exploded in Lebanon, Gold Apollo founder Hsu Ching-Kuang said. The devices were made by a European company that had the right to use the Taiwanese brand, he added.

Details

A pager, also known as a beeper or bleeper, is a wireless telecommunications device that receives and displays alphanumeric or voice messages. One-way pagers can only receive messages, while response pagers and two-way pagers can also acknowledge, reply to, and originate messages using an internal transmitter. In Japanese, it was commonly called a pocket bell (ポケットベル, poketto beru) or pokeberu (ポケベル), which is an example of wasei-eigo. Pagers operate as part of a paging system which includes one or more fixed transmitters (or in the case of response pagers and two-way pagers, one or more base stations), as well as a number of pagers carried by mobile users. These systems can range from a restaurant system with a single low power transmitter, to a nationwide system with thousands of high-power base stations.