When a simultaneous explosion of pagers targeting Hezbollah members took off across Lebanon on Tuesday little was it clear that the incident would lead to an investigative path from Taiwan to Hungary.

The incident, which took Lebanon off guard, marked one of the serious breaches faced by the Iran-backed party that has been engaged in border attacks against Israel amid the ongoing Gaza war.

Hezbollah blamed Israel for detonating the pagers with media reports suggesting that Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside the thousands of pagers that Hezbollah imported.

What does Taiwan have to do with the incident?

After the explosions took place, killing 12 people and wounding between 2,750 and 2,800 others, the pagers were linked to Taiwanese company Gold Apollo.

Images of destroyed pagers analyzed by Reuters showed a format and stickers on the back that were consistent with pagers made by the company.

In response to the news, Gold Apollo founder and president, Hsu Ching-kuang, said on Wednesday that the product wasn’t theirs and “only that it had our brand on it.”

The Taiwanese economy ministry said that it has no record of any Taiwanese companies exporting pagers directly to Lebanon between 2022 and 2024, according to NPR.

From Lebanon to Taiwan to Hungary: How did this happen?

 

Hsu explained that a Budapest-based company called BAC Consulting has manufactured the devices. Gold Apollo also noted that the AR-924 model was produced and sold by BAC.

“There was nothing in those devices that we had manufactured or exported to them [BAC],” Hsu was quoted by NPR as saying. He noted that the pagers “were entirely different” from his designs and contained a chip that Gold Apollo does not use in its pagers, according to NPR.

The outlet added that Hsu said that the last time Gold Apollo shipped components to BAC was earlier this year.

What is BAC Consulting?

The stated address for BAC Consulting in Budapest was a peach building in a mostly residential street in an outer suburb. Footage released by The Associated Press showed the company’s name posted on the glass door on a sheet in what appeared to look more like a residential building.

The company’s website has appeared to be inaccessible since the morning, but the company’s CEO has been revealed to be Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono.

Her LinkedIn profile says that among the posts that she has occupied was working as a strategic advisor for various organizations including UNESCO and Venture Capitals.

BAC didn’t respond to Al Arabiya English’s calls for comment, but Barsony-Arcidiacono was quoted by Sky News as saying that she doesn’t “make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong.”

Middle East payments

According to both Reuters and NPR, Hsu said on Wednesday that he did find the payment transfers made to his company to be “strange.”

Although based in Budapest, Hsu, according to NPR, said the company paid Gold Apollo from a Middle Eastern bank account that was blocked at least once by the company’s bank in Taiwan.