Bulgaria will investigate a company linked to the sale of pagers to Lebanon's militant group Hezbollah that exploded this week in a coordinated attack, the state security agency said on Thursday.
Bulgaria's state security agency, DANS, said in a statement that it is working with the interior ministry to probe the role of a company registered in Bulgaria, without naming it.
It said that it did not detect any shipments of the suspected pagers on Bulgarian territory.
- The Japanese maker of the brand of walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting the Hezbollah armed group that killed 20 people in Lebanon and injured hundreds of others suggested that counterfeit models could have been used in the attacks.
ICOM has said it halted production of the radio models identified in the attack a decade ago and that most of those still on sale were counterfeit.
"There’s no way a bomb could have been integrated into one of our devices during manufacturing. The process is highly automated and fast-paced, so there’s no time for such things," Yoshiki Enomoto a director at ICOM told Reuters outside the company's headquarters in Osaka, Japan on Thursday.
Bulgaria did not supply the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement with the pagers that later exploded, nor did it act as an intermediary in trade operations, the country's State National Security Agency said in response to statements made by Hungarian media.
ReplyDelete"Following media reports claiming that a Bulgaria-based firm delivered batches of communication equipment (pagers) to the Hezbollah organization, which later exploded in Lebanon and Syria, the Agency clarifies that no customs operations involving such goods were conducted through Bulgarian territory," the press service said in a statement.