Japan firm says it stopped making walkie-talkies used in Lebanon blasts
Japan firm says it stopped making walkie-talkies used in Lebanon blasts
A Japanese firm whose name was on devices that exploded says it discontinued them a decade ago.
A Japanese handheld radio manufacturer has distanced itself from walkie-talkies bearing its logo that exploded in Lebanon, saying it discontinued production of the devices a decade ago.
At least 20 people were killed and 450 injured after hundreds of walkie-talkies, some reportedly used by the armed group Hezbollah, exploded across Lebanon on Wednesday.
The devices, according to photos and video of the aftermath of the attack, appear to be IC-V82 transceivers made by Icom, an Osaka-based telecommunications manufacturer.
But Icom says it hasn't produced or exported IC-V82s, nor the batteries needed to operate them, for 10 years.
It is the second Asian company to be embroiled in bombing incidents in Lebanon this week, after thousands of exploding pagers seemingly linked to Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo killed at least 12 people and injured more than 2,000.
I bet Lebanon got "a sweet deal" on some "old stock" of pagers and radios they couldn't pass up.
Israel’s spy agency Mossad, which has a long history of sophisticated operations on foreign soil, planted explosives inside pagers imported by Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations, a senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters. Source
Experts generally believe a small mount of stable explosive was carefully implanted into each sabotaged device. Alan Woodward, a professor of cybersecurity at Surrey University, said: “There wouldn’t need to be much explosive, as proximity to a human body means it would cause injury even if it was a few grams.”
The first wave of explosions – which occurred from about 3.30pm local time on Tuesday – appear to have been triggered by a special message from Hezbollah leadership, implying, Woodward argued, a specific modification of the pagers’ embedded software. This meant it would trigger an explosion when the appropriate message was sent.
It may have been a default setting on the pagers, but the trigger message came with a cynical twist. Eyewitnesses say the pager bleeped, then paused, then detonated – giving enough time for them to be brought closer to the owner’s face – which is why Lebanese doctors reported treating multiple hand and eye injuries after the blast. Source
Credit where it is due. Those genocidal motherfuckers are scary as hell.
EDIT: I understand the downvotes. Nobody, including myself, wants to say anything positive about the current Israeli regime or their industrial complex of death. Fuck those guys. That said, this op and the discipline it must have taken to keep it under wraps until just the right moment is impressive and VERY scary.
I recently commented on NCD with a twelve-year-old, humorous-given-present-context review I found of that radio on eham, when apparently counterfeit IC-V82 radios were a serious problem:
https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=5046
Watch out for fake v82's! Only buy from authorized retailers or someone who did.
Words of wisdom there, eham.net.
https://jpost.com/breaking-news/article-820808
The walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting the Hezbollah terrorist group that killed 20 people in Lebanon and injured hundreds of others could not have made the exploding devices, the Japanese company said 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," Yoshiki Enomoto, a director at ICOM, told Reuters outside the company's headquarters in Osaka, Japan, on Thursday.
ICOM has said it halted production of the radio models identified in the attack a decade ago and that most of those still on sale were counterfeit.
"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," Enomoto said.
I wonder if the Mossad deliberately bought old decade+ out-of-production stock to insulate the manufacturer from blowback? Like if they chose a walkie-talkie currently sold by Motorola then it would basically kill that production line and hurt the company by association. People would avoid all Motorola devices in case there were Mossad explosives inside.
Also maybe they had these devices built and ready to go years ago and had this James Bond shit sitting on the shelf waiting to be put into circulation? This is a one-time attack vector. They won't be able to do this again so they wanted to make it count.
Most likely it was counterfeit radios. The batteries in decade old Icom radios would probably be dead by now.
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