In addition to the searches at four sites, including the Gold Apollo headquarters, two witnesses, including the company’s founder and chairman, were questioned late into the night from Thursday 18 to Friday 19 September as part of the investigation into the manufacture and sabotage of Hezbollah’s beepers that exploded, killing several people and injuring thousands.
“We have asked the National Security Investigation Bureau to question two witnesses and search four locations,” the Taipei prosecutor’s office confirmed Thursday, without naming the locations searched or the people questioned. “They have cooperated by providing relevant documents and information,” it added in comments reported by AFP.
Gold Apollo denies involvement in beeper manufacturing
The head of Taiwanese company Gold Apollo continues to insist that he authorized BAC Consulting to use his brand to distribute its products, but he still denies any responsibility for the design and manufacture of the booby-trapped pagers. “These are not our products … from start to finish,” its director, Hsu Ching-kuang, told reporters in Taipei on Wednesday.
According to him, the pagers found in Lebanon are completely different from his own models and he accuses his business partner of having manufactured them independently. The model of pagers found in Lebanon was, however, clearly visible on the Gold Apollo website a few days ago. It has since been removed.
The Gold Apollo manager also claims not to have suspected anything, but recalls that a payment from the company BAC Consulting had been blocked by his bank because it was issued by a Middle Eastern bank, without being alarmed. The Hungarian government, for its part, assured that BAC was “a commercial intermediary, without any production or operational site in Hungary.”
Asked about the pagers used in Lebanon by Hezbollah, Economy Minister Kuo Jyh-huei said that one could “be sure that they are not produced in Taiwan.” Prime Minister Cho Jung-tai reaffirmed on Friday that “the company and Taiwan have not directly exported pagers to Lebanon.”
