Gold Apollo said the company does not manufacture the devices, pointing to another company with which it has a licensing agreement to use its label.
Gold Apollo, the Taiwanese company named by US and other officials as the supplier of the pagers used in attacks that killed at least 11 people in Lebanon, sought on Wednesday to distance itself from the devices.
US and other officials have described the attack as saying Israel had planted explosives in a shipment of pagers sent from Gold Apollo in a coordinated campaign targeting Hezbollah.
Gold Apollo denied that it made the pagers, instead pointing to another manufacturer that it said had made a model of the pager using Gold Apollo’s brand as part of a licensing agreement.
The explosive, hidden inside a block of pagers, detonated after receiving a signal. About 2,700 people were injured in the attack.
But at Gold Apollo’s office on the outskirts of Taipei on Wednesday, company founder and chairman Hsu Ching-kuang said the pagers appeared to be made by another company, PAC. He said he had agreed three years ago to allow PAC to sell its own products using the Gold Apollo label, which he said has a good reputation in the mainstream market.
“That product is not ours. They are sticking to our company’s brand,” Mr. Hsu told reporters, in exchange for which his company received a share of the profits. He said PAC is based in Europe and has an office in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan.
“We only provide brand trademark support and have no involvement in the design or manufacture of this product,” Gold Apollo said in a written statement. Still, the Gold Apollo website showed an image of the pager model until the page was removed on Wednesday.
Attempts to contact PAC and Mr. Hsu’s account were not immediately successful. No one answered a request for the office address of a company with that name in Taipei.
If confirmed, Mr. Hsu’s explanation suggests it will be complicated to determine how and when the pagers, known as Model AR924, were filled with explosives. Taiwan’s huge consumer electronics industry is a complex supply chain of brands, manufacturers and agents.
Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, which oversees the trade, said no such pagers from Gold Apollo were “exported directly to Lebanon,” as its records show. The ministry said the company’s pagers were mainly exported to Europe and North America. The agency reviewed news reports and photographs and concluded the pagers were modified after being exported from Taiwan, the ministry said. The New York Times could not independently confirm the estimate.
Mr. Hsu said he has a longstanding relationship with PAC before they took on a brand licensing deal. Looking back, there was a “strange” incident at PAC when a local Taiwanese bank delayed a bank transfer from the company because the local bank was suspicious about it. The transfer may have come from a bank in the Middle East, Mr. Su said. He did not specify which country.
