Prosecutors in Taiwan say they have questioned four people so far in a probe into pagers that exploded in Lebanon. A Taiwanese company was initially named as the maker of the devices.
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00:00Prosecutors in Taipei say that so far they have questioned four people in an investigation
00:05linked to exploding pagers in Lebanon.
00:08The pagers, used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah, exploded last
00:13week in a deadly attack, widely believed to have been carried out by Israel.
00:18A Taiwanese company was initially named as having made the pagers, a claim it denied.
00:24For the latest on this, Louise Wat joins us now live from Taipei.
00:28Louise, what do we know about these four people who have been questioned?
00:35Well, Joyce, we know that all four of them were questioned as witnesses.
00:40Now, one of them was the boss of Gold Apollo, that's the company at the center of all of
00:45this.
00:46There was also a woman questioned who's been identified in media reports as Teresa Wu,
00:52who works for a company called Apollo Systems that was briefly based in a shared office
00:59in Taipei.
01:02And the other two, we know even less about them, apart from one was a current staffer
01:06at Gold Apollo and the other one was a previous staffer there.
01:11Now, the company Gold Apollo has said right from the start that it did not make the pagers
01:17that exploded in Lebanon.
01:19Instead, it blamed a company in Hungary that it said it had licensed its trademark to.
01:27But that company, which looked to be just a one-person consultancy in the Hungarian
01:32capital, that, according to a New York Times report, was actually a front for Israeli intelligence.
01:38Now, in the last 24 hours, the investigation worldwide has widened again.
01:45Norway's security police say they're investigating, well, they're looking into reports that a
01:51Norwegian-owned company was linked to the sale of these pagers to Hezbollah.
01:59And those pagers, they exploded nine days ago.
02:03On that very day, police here in Taiwan started searching the offices of Gold Apollo in New
02:11Taipei City.
02:13We don't know if any charges will or will not be forthcoming, but prosecutors in Taipei
02:19say today that they're still processing the case and they hope to have a resolution as
02:25soon as possible.