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Japan firm denies making exploding walkie-talkies

ICOM says it halted production of models identified in the attack a decade ago

Published: Thu 19 Sep 2024, 4:24 PM

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  • Reuters

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Japanese radio equipment maker Icom Inc director Yoshiki Enomoto shows its model IC-V82 device, which the company said they stopped production in 2014, during an interview at its headquarters in Osaka, Japan, September 19, 2024. — Reuters

Japanese radio equipment maker Icom Inc director Yoshiki Enomoto shows its model IC-V82 device, which the company said they stopped production in 2014, during an interview at its headquarters in Osaka, Japan, September 19, 2024. — Reuters

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

"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 said outside the company's headquarters in Osaka, Japan on Thursday.

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 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.



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