2800 people injured, at least 12 dead and 170 in critical condition in Pager explosions. Hezbollah blames Israel.

[SvennoJ]

Japanese firm says highly unlikely exploding devices were its products

Icom, the Japanese maker of the brand of walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting Lebanese group Hezbollah, says it could not have made the devices.

“In light of multiple pieces of information that have been revealed so far, chances are extremely low that the wireless devices that exploded were our products,” Icom said in a Friday statement.

Pictures of the Hezbollah walkie-talkies that exploded on Wednesday, killing 20 people and injuring hundreds of others in an attack blamed on Israel, showed labels reading “ICOM” and “made in Japan”.

In the wake of the explosions, Yoshiki Enomoto, a director at Icom, told reporters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka that “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,” he said.

Lebanon Pager Blasts Are A Violation of International Law: UN



“International humanitarian law prohibits the use of booby-trap devices in the form of apparently harmless portable objects,” the UN’s High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Turk, told the Security Council during an emergency session on Lebanon requested by Algeria.