Japanese company denies making Hezbollah's exploding walkie-talkies

The Japanese maker of the brand of walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting Hezbollah that killed 20 people in Lebanon and injured hundreds of others has said that it could not have made the exploding devices, Reuters reports.

“There’s no way a bomb could have been integrated into one of our devices during manufacturing,” a director at ICOM told Reuters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Japan, on Thursday. “The process is highly automated and fast-paced, so there’s no time for such things,” added Yoshiki Enomoto.

The detonation of hand-held radios used by Hezbollah on Wednesday in Beirut’s suburbs and the Bekaa Valley, followed a series of electronic pager explosions on Tuesday that killed at least 12 people, including two children, and injured 3,000 others.

ICOM has said that 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,” explained Enomoto. “If it’s genuine, we’ll have to trace its distribution to figure out how it ended up there.”

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