OSAKA, Sept 19 (Askume) – The maker of a Japanese walkie-talkie brand linked to the bombings targeting Lebanon’s Hezbollah militant group that killed 25 people and injured hundreds said it does not produce the explosive devices.
“It is impossible to integrate a bomb into any of our devices during the manufacturing process,” ICOM director Yoshiki Enomoto told Askume on Thursday outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Japan. “This process is highly automated and fast-paced. Not possible.”
Electronic pagers exploded on Tuesday after Hezbollah used radio to attack Beirut suburbs and the Bekaa Valley on Wednesday, killing at least 12 people, including two children, and wounding 3,000 others.
Icom says it discontinued production of the radio models discovered in the attacks a decade ago and that most of the radio models still on sale are counterfeit.
“If it turns out to be fake, we’ll have to investigate how someone could have made a bomb like ours,” Enomoto said. “If it’s real, we’ll have to track its distribution and figure out how it got there.”
A company representative for Lebanon’s Power Group, the sole official distributor of Icom in the country, said it did not import the model that exploded on Wednesday and that there had been no explosions in its stores or warehouses.
The representative, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the model that exploded on Wednesday was discontinued by Icom in 2014 and the power group only imports models that are still in production.
Several models of Icom handheld radios are advertised for sale on the company’s Facebook page, but discontinued models are not advertised.
