From Taipei to Budapest: the mysterious trail of exploding pagers

Founded three decades ago, Gold Apollo is a nondescript, 40-person company in a shabby Taipei suburb, one of the tens of thousands of Taiwanese companies that manufacture the ubiquitous, cheap electronics of daily life.

Launched in 1995, when mobile phones had yet to supplant pagers, one of its current bestsellers is the vibrating pucks that coffee shops hand out to customers to signal that their drink is ready.

Then, at 3.30pm local time on Tuesday, thousands of Gold Apollo-branded pagers exploded in Beirut, plunging the Lebanese capital into a panic, and sending hundreds of members of the powerful Lebanese militant group, Hizbollah, to overcrowded hospitals with mangled hands, facial injuries and worse.

The bloody trail left behind by the weaponisation of this almost obsolete gadget has yielded some tantalising clues. They stretch from a befuddled Taiwanese chief executive suddenly swarmed by reporters to an elusive Hungarian particle physicist who had made an unexpected detour into selling cheap electronics from an office building next to a Budapest motorway.

Hizbollah’s preliminary investigation, according to one of its officials, alleges that Israel’s spies somehow hijacked a delivery of pagers to Lebanon, packed them with a tiny load of explosives and components and then detonated them almost simultaneously.

“It’s something that can be done, and has been done, by Israel, but never on this scale,” said a person with previous experience in using communications equipment to infiltrate espionage targets. “To do this at exactly the same time to this many devices — it’s unheard of.”

At least a dozen people were killed, including two children, according to local health officials. At least 2,700 people were injured, according to Lebanese health officials. Hizbollah said 10 of those killed were its members. It has blamed Israel and vowed revenge, ratcheting tensions between the regional rivals up another notch following 10 months of escalating cross-border attacks that have threatened to boil over into an all-out war.

The Israeli government declined to comment as part of its long-running policy to neither confirm nor deny its involvement in such attacks. A senior Israeli official working in its clandestine services replied with a winking emoji when asked if the Israeli spy agency Mossad was involved in the attack.

The apparent act of international espionage and subterfuge has thrilled the Israelis and embarrassed Hizbollah, coming just months after the targeted assassination in a Beirut suburb of Fuad Shukr, one of the militant group’s most senior commanders who lived deep in the shadows.

But the practical complications of carrying out such an audacious attack have left behind a mystery straddling three continents. In Taiwan, the Shilin prosecutor’s office said a department handling national security cases was investigating.

How exactly a batch of black AR924 pagers carrying the Gold Apollo branding on their backs ended up at the heart of this operation has confused even Hsu Ching-Kuang, the company’s founder and president, who was swarmed by television reporters outside his office on Wednesday.

In the course of a few hours on Wednesday, he and his staff offered up half a dozen different explanations. A sales manager first told the Financial Times that the company had been selling to Lebanon for years. The government released a statement saying the manufacturing and assembly of such pagers was done in Taiwan.

But then, Gold Apollo pointed to Budapest, naming BAC Consulting as a company with whom it had a long-running licensing agreement. This allowed BAC to design, manufacture and sell the pagers in designated regions but under the Gold Apollo brand and trademark.

But Taiwan government officials and industry experts said any such device assembled in Europe or the Middle East would still have to source most components from Taiwanese- or Chinese-owned companies. It highlights the complexity of technology supply chains, which span tens of thousands of often small Taiwanese businesses. Many of them are run by founders, people with ample experience in running factories in China or Vietnam, but with little understanding of cross-border security issues or export control rules.

“The key parts of pagers are low-end communications chips, receivers and basic-grade motherboards,” said an official at Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs. “Most of these are made by Taiwanese companies and Chinese companies.”

BAC Consulting, according to Hungarian company records, was set up in May 2022 by a woman called Cristiana Rosaria Bársony-Arcidiacono, now aged 49. She is apparently the sole director of a company that generated revenues of about $800,000 in 2023. She did not reply to calls and messages seeking comment.

Her LinkedIn profile lists a PhD from UCL in particle physics among her qualifications, as well as stints at other elite UK institutions such as Soas and the London School of Economics. One person who met her in recent years at a communications conference in Latvia described her as an academic.

Company records list her home address as a Communist-era high-rise in north Budapest. Four neighbours and a hairdresser in the building told the FT they did not recall seeing her in recent years. The apartment, shared with her mother who neighbours said lives abroad, had a security door with three heavy locks. While her mother “comes here once in a while”, Bársony-Arcidiacono last visited “a long time ago”, her next-door neighbour said.

Meanwhile, there was little activity on Wednesday at her office building, a nondescript house next to a motorway leading out of Budapest. The exception was two men who pulled up in a black Mercedes sedan.

Her picture also appears on the website of a company called Eden Global Impact, which lists an address in San Francisco’s Mission district, and describes her as an “expert in humanitarian and social action and programs, with extensive competences in the the non profit sector”. The group lists products for sale including solar power generators, water filtration systems and an “off-grid satellite decentralised phone”.

It is unclear how or why an academic with wide expertise in climate change, particle physics and the global economy would be selling Taiwanese pagers to Lebanese buyers. She told NBC News on Wednesday: “I don’t make the pagers. I am just the intermediate. I think you got it wrong.”

Additional reporting by Raya Jalabi in Beirut