How did Hezbollah’s pagers explode in Lebanon? An expert gives his view

with Tony lrin who's director at zero risk International and he gave his insights on the Potential Threat that pagers pose given that the device is thought to be quote quite obsolete but are still in use quite a serious threat to be honest with you because the pages are smaller uh Nimble and quite easily kind of discreted uh the mobile phones themselves have been used before in the past as well to to have kind of remote detonation there uh but the pages themselves offer a really good kind of portal with regards to a battery power strength

um simple thing is you know a solution like this this is like three grams of what was considered like an explosive anyway it's not an explosive here thank God but it represents that particular kind of um size that when put into the pagia and uh with that particular small data board that they've actually built into there uh it gives you the chance to actually kind of multiple messages out at once which we've actually seen so it's a it's a very very good easy discret method of actually being able to actually Target somebody I appreciate that

you deconstructed that pager for us for many of us it's been a long time since we've actually touched one so how much planning do you think went into this sophisticated coordination involving this old school device today started with different theories and it seems now explosives were actually hand planted in these devices well I I've got a couple of theories on this to be honest with you he has been I think that at the packaging stage um I think it would be kind of really difficult to do something there you know with a with a commercial

company uh that's one thing I I I find really kind of difficult to comprehend because for each of these devices you know there's an element of risk of being found out I think it's more likely that what the Israelis have done or if it is the Israelis but it all starts to point towards that particular area that they've done a switch and uh in mass as well so potentially what they could have done is built these devices and then switched the package from a commercial point of view um so they're already pre-prepped and the actual

small explosives are in there it it takes a special small motherboard to be in there uh but at the end of the day the uh as we said anyway it's commercial explosives and uh as you can see from that particular image there that you're running uh it takes a small amount anyway to cause maximum Devastation around the abdominal area which is where where some of the pages are kept and uh also for some of the children that were involved at that height as well when the pager does go off it's unfortunately it's going to affect

a lot of the kids that are uh are moving around in markets and things like that where where everything's kind of a tight environment and let's talk about the manufacturing side of things taiwan's gold Apollo says that it didn't make the pages that were used in these detonations instead by a company in Europe that had the right to use their firm's brand but the New York Times claims otherwise how key is the manufacturer in this case and could there be any accountability on them I I think basically what's happened is the actual the remnants of

the pag that's got that label and Syria numbers and so on and so forth do Point towards that uh you know the company the gold Apollo um but again look you've got to look at the sophistication of just exactly what went on as well uh the Israelis have got very good history of being able to actually kind of infiltrate switch maneuver and uh and get their own particular devices or their own kit into an area and uh and you know coming back to your original question there it was a long time in the planning it

just this thing just doesn't happen overnight it's a question of building up your human intelligence finding out just exactly where the weakest link was looking at logisticians you know where are these Pages made what are they doing where's the supply chain where's the weakness in the supply chain as well and that's really what some of the security forces have got to actually find out uh to find out really fully whether this particular device goes all the way back to Apollo or whether there was a switch or whether was something else that happened along the chain

uh you know along that particular process really