Japanese handheld radio manufacturer Icom said on Thursday that it has no connection to the walkie-talkies that exploded in the hands of Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon, and the particular model of transceiver involved was discontinued ten years ago.
Hezbollah’s radios detonated on Wednesday, the day after their pagers blew up. Some Hezbollah operatives injured by the exploding walkie-talkies were reportedly attending funeral services for comrades killed by the pager bombs.
The exploding pagers bore the label of a prominent Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo, which insisted it had nothing to do with the bombing attack. Gold Apollo said the pagers that detonated were made under license by a dodgy Hungarian firm called BAC Consulting.
In a similar vein, Osaka-based Icom said it has not produced or exported the IC-V82 model radio handset or its battery pack for almost a decade. The walkie-talkie explosions may have been engineered by secreting an explosive chemical in their batteries.
“The IC-V82 is a handheld radio that was produced and exported, including to the Middle East, from 2004 to October 2014. It was discontinued about 10 years ago, and since then, it has not been shipped from our company,” the Icom statement said.
“The production of the batteries needed to operate the main unit has also been discontinued, and a hologram seal to distinguish counterfeit products was not attached, so it is not possible to confirm whether the product shipped from our company,” the statement added.
Icom executives suggested the Hezbollah radios might have been cheap copies manufactured by an unauthorized third party.
“If it turns out to be counterfeit, then we’ll have to investigate how someone created a bomb that looks like our product. If it’s genuine, we’ll have to trace its distribution to figure out how it ended up there,” Icom director Enomoto Yoshiki told Reuters on Thursday.
“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,” Enomoto said.
Lebanon has a single authorized distributor for Icom products called Power Group. A Power Group representative said the company does not import discontinued models like the IC-V82. Reuters checked its website and found none of the discontinued units were listed for sale.
The BBC, on Thursday, reported that Hezbollah purchased a large number of the discontinued walkie-talkies about five months ago, but it was unclear who sold them. According to the BBC, it took “a matter of seconds” to find IC-V82 units for sale online.
Hezbollah sources claimed Israeli intelligence triggered the pager explosions because the Israelis feared Hezbollah was about to discover the more powerful bombs planted in their walkie-talkies.
“There are several electronic issues that we were able to discover — but not the pagers. They tricked us, hats off to the enemy,” one of the Hezbollah sources said.
Hezbollah was reportedly still handing out Gold Apollo-branded pagers just hours before the string of explosions began on Tuesday.
Lebanese security officials said on Friday that Israel followed up the pager and radio explosions with one of the heaviest airstrike campaigns of 2024, launching at least 70 strikes on Hezbollah territory.
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