By Tom Bateman
TOKYO (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 told Reuters 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.
(Reporting by Tom Bateman; Writing by Tim Kelly; Editing by Peter Graff)
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