Japanese company denies making exploding Hezbollah walkie-talkies

By Tom Bateman

TOKYO (Reuters) – A Japanese walkie-talkie maker linked to explosions targeting the Hezbollah armed group that killed 20 people in Lebanon and wounded hundreds said it could not have manufactured the explosives.

“There is no way a bomb could be integrated into one of our devices during production. The process is highly automated and fast, so there is no time for things like that,” Yoshiki Enomoto, an ICOM executive, told Reuters outside the company’s headquarters in Osaka, Japan, on Thursday.

The detonation of portable radios used by Hezbollah on Wednesday in the outskirts of Beirut and the Bekaa Valley followed a series of electronic pager explosions on Tuesday that killed at least 12 people, including two children, and wounded 3,000.

ICOM said it had stopped producing the radio models identified in the attack a decade ago and that most of those still on sale were counterfeits.

“If it turns out to be a fake, we’ll have to investigate how someone made a bomb that looks like our product. If it’s authentic, we’ll have to trace its distribution to find out how it got there,” Enomoto said.

(Reporting by Tom Bateman; Writing by Tim Kelly; Editing by Peter Graff)