Two European firms in focus of Hezbollah pager explosions

The Taiwanese company whose name appeared on the pagers that detonated across Lebanon has denied manufacturing the devices. That has put relatively unknown Hungarian and Bulgarian firms in the spotlight.

A Hungarian firm, BAC Consulting, has been linked to the thousands of pagers that exploded in Lebanon on Tuesday, killing at least 12 people and leaving nearly 3,000 wounded.

The name of the Budapest-based firm first cropped up in a statement by a Taiwanese manufacturer, Gold Apollo, whose label appeared on the devices. Gold Apollo said it did not manufacture the devices and that they were made by its Hungarian partner, BAC Consulting.

"The product was not ours. It was only that it had our brand on it," Gold Apollo founder and president Hsu Ching-kuang told reporters at the company's offices in the northern Taiwanese city of New Taipei on Wednesday.

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Meanwhile, Telex, a Hungarian media outlet, has reported that it was actually Norta Global, a company based in Bulgaria's capital Sofia, that supplied the pagers to Hezbollah. The Bulgarian company, owned by a Norwegian citizen, was reportedly behind the deal with Gold Apollo, although on paper it was BAC that signed the contract, Telex wrote.