Hungary denies being Hezbollah’s pager manufacturer

“The authorities have confirmed that the company in question is only a middleman in the transaction, with no production facilities or operations in Hungary,” Zoltan Kovacs, a spokesman for Prime Minister Viktor Orban, said today.

The statement came after Taiwan-based Gold Apollo said it did not manufacture the Hezbollah pagers that exploded on September 17, but only licensed its brand to Hungary-based BAC Consulting KFT to manufacture the products.

Mr Kovacs added that BAC Consulting KFT had a representative registered at an address in the capital Budapest, but stressed that the “devices in question” had never been in Hungary. “The Hungarian National Security Service is working with relevant international partners. This incident does not pose a security risk to the country,” he said.

A spokesman for the European Commission (EC) on the same day denied that the CEO of BAC Consulting KFT had worked for the commission as listed on his LinkedIn page, but said the EC was checking whether he worked for the commission through “external contractors”.

BAC Consulting KFT, which has been in business since 2022, describes itself as working on projects such as cybersecurity, telecommunications and jewelry, with annual revenue of around $600,000. The company and its executives have not commented on the information provided by Gold Apollo.

A series of pager explosions in Lebanon on the afternoon of September 17 killed at least 12 people, including two children, and injured nearly 3,000.

Hezbollah issued a statement accusing Israel of “bearing full responsibility” and vowed to make it “receive the appropriate punishment in both predictable and unpredictable ways.” The Lebanese government and Hezbollah’s ally Iran made similar statements.

Although no party has claimed responsibility for the incident, all eyes are on Israel, which killed a senior Hamas member by planting explosives in his phone. International media outlets such as CNN, Reuters, and ABC quoted US and Lebanese security officials as saying that Israel had tampered with a batch of pagers that Hezbollah had purchased in recent months.

Tel Aviv has not commented on the information so far.