"We may not be a large company but we are a responsible one. This is very embarrassing," is how Hsu Ching-kuang, founder and president of Taiwanese company Gold Apollo, whose pagers exploded and injured about 4,000 Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon and Syria yesterday, killing several of them, responded this morning, when Taiwanese police raided the company's premises. Speaking to Reuters, Hsu denied that his small company, which employs just 40 people in New Taipei, had produced the devices involved in the attack. He said that they were produced by a European company called BAC, which was licensed to use Gold Apollo’s brand. "The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it," Hsu told reporters, according to Reuters. Gold Apollo’s website was taken down shortly after Hsu issued his denial.
Hezbollah has held Israel responsible for yesterday's explosions, and says that it's response "will come from an unexpected direction."
Gold Apollo was founded in 1995, in the heyday of pagers, as a supplier of devices that displayed numbers only, such as the number of the caller or a numeric code. It went on to produce intercoms, radio transmitters, LED screens, and alpha-numeric pagers such as the AR-924 model, which was the device in yesterday’s attack. Before it was removed, Gold Apollo’s website boasted that the company’s devices were used by hospitals, restaurants, and emergency teams all over the world. The company’s Wikipedia entry states that it distributes its products mainly in Europe, East Asia, the US, and many countries in the Middle East, among them Israel, Lebanon, Iran, the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan. The company is privately held, and according to the Tradewheel website, its annual revenue does not exceed $10 million.
The Hezbollah terrorist organization bought thousands of pagers in order to avoid using newer and more hackable means of communication that could betray the user’s location, and in order to pass encrypted messages. The messages can be intercepted, but locating users who receive messages only is considered impossible. Hezbollah sought a secure communication channel, but now its vulnerability has become clear.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on September 18, 2024.
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