Greg Barton: Deakin University terrorism expert on nine people dying after pagers exploded in Lebanon

There's suggestions a sabotage of a delivery from Taiwan lead to exploding pagers injuring thousands in Lebanon.

At least nine people are dead - including a child - and close to 3000 injured after Hezbollah-owned pagers blew up simultaneously.

Hezbollah is blaming Israel.

Deakin University terrorism expert Greg Barton says Hezbollah ordered 5000 pagers from Taiwan about five months ago to avoid Israeli surveillance.

"Presumably, there was circuitry added with explosives, coded so when a wireless message went out with a certain code, it triggered the devices." 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Afternoon.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
At least nine people are dead and two eight hundred
injured in Lebanon after an attack on Hezbola. But this
is the interesting thing about it. This wasn't your standard
type of attack. Instead, what happened this morning is that
thousands of pagers, as in the nineteen eighties communication devices
that you clipped on your belt, they all exploded simultaneously.
Kizbola is blaming Israel for this. Israel has not admitted

(00:21):
to the attack. Greg Barton is a terrorism expert at
Deacon University in Melbourne with us, Hey.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Greg, hey, have they good agree with you?

Speaker 2 (00:28):
What do you reckon? Has happened here?

Speaker 1 (00:29):
Right?

Speaker 2 (00:30):
Some people are surmising that there was some sort of
electronic interference that caused all the batteries to explode, but
others are saying Israel has got into the supply chain
and put explosives in the pages. What do you reckon?

Speaker 1 (00:41):
Well, Heather, things are becoming reasonably clear now we've not
got a admission from Israel. Perhaps won't have one. They
prefer to work with plausible deniability. Think about the assassination
of Ismail Hania when he was visiting Tehran, the Hamas leader.
So we probably won't hear any confirmation, but it appears
that these devices were are designed by a company called

(01:01):
Apollo Gold in Taiwan. Apollo Gold has said that actually
this batch was made by a European company under license,
and would that would sort of align with what appears
to have happened, which is that somebody in an SBNA
jact has gotten into the factory, or at least into
the devices before they're shipped, and has inserted a circuit
board with some military gray plastic explosives, done in a

(01:24):
way that if you opened up the device you wouldn't
see anything amiss. These devices work on wireless like radio
signals that you receive a text message or a broadcast.
They don't glocate. So this is the reason that they
had ordered five thousand of these devices about five months ago,
because they recognized that Israel was able to locate their

(01:45):
fighters with mobile phone devices. So they said Hassan nas Ruler,
the leader of his POLAS, said back in February, get
off your phones, get off your into net devices. They're
on to us. So they went back to using these
issues nineteen eighties ninety nineties wireless page assystems. Presumably there

(02:06):
was in that circuitry that's added with explosives. It was
coded so that when a wireless message went out with
a certain code, it triggered the devices. Now, some of
the devices would have been out of range and hadn't
got that wireless signals, and not all of them detonated,
but it's now being said that three thousand of them detonated.
The amount of explosives was not lethal for most people.
I mean, it's enough to give you a horrible wound

(02:28):
and your hip of it's on your belt or you've worsen.
You hold it up to your face to read the message.
Some people have lost eyes. Some people were killed, unfortunately
at least one child, which is pretty grateful to think about.
But it's it seems more of a psyops operation, so
that his bulla feels that they can't trust their devices,
they can't trust their communication systems. There's been a major

(02:49):
penetration of their human network. So somebody's given the game
away with the order for pages, and that's very destabilizing
to recognize that you have been compromised.

Speaker 2 (03:00):
Greet Does that mean that? Does that mean that every
single person who had a pager was linked to his boler?

Speaker 1 (03:06):
Yes, every person. These are pages that were issued by
his blow to their personnel, but some of these personnel
are not necessarily fighters, some of them. Bear in mind,
this is a hybrid organization. It's part political, it's a
political party in Lebanon. Some of its employees, as with Hermas,
were healthcare workers and others who weren't necessarily frontline fighters.

(03:26):
Are not saying that they're innocent by association, but just
that you know, it's not that not every one of
these people with this device was a gun carrying fighter.
Some of them were, you know, sort of bureaucratic, democratic
personnel within an organization that's a very significant part of
Lebanese society. So it's a really complicated story in terms

(03:47):
of comparability. It's a nasty organization. His below involved in terrorism,
so no getting away from this. But there was a
sense that these detonations were indiscriminate because it could have
been a child picking up dad's page. It could be
somebody who wasn't really involved in militant activity who was targeted.
And as I said, the charges were non lethal for

(04:09):
the most part, So it seems to be more about
sending a message and provoking a response than about really
incapacitating his willa's military network.

Speaker 2 (04:19):
Yeah, Greg, thank you very much, really appreciate you explaining
that there's Greg Barton Deakin University terrorism expert. And by
the way, there is a is it an expectation now
that retaliation is likely and as a result of that,
a US defense ship has just moved away from Israel's coast.

Speaker 1 (04:33):
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