A Japanese firm whose name was on devices that exploded says it discontinued them a decade ago.

A Japanese handheld radio manufacturer has distanced itself from walkie-talkies bearing its logo that exploded in Lebanon, saying it discontinued production of the devices a decade ago.

At least 20 people were killed and 450 injured after hundreds of walkie-talkies, some reportedly used by the armed group Hezbollah, exploded across Lebanon on Wednesday.

The devices, according to photos and video of the aftermath of the attack, appear to be IC-V82 transceivers made by Icom, an Osaka-based telecommunications manufacturer.

But Icom says it hasn’t produced or exported IC-V82s, nor the batteries needed to operate them, for 10 years.

It is the second Asian company to be embroiled in bombing incidents in Lebanon this week, after thousands of exploding pagers seemingly linked to Taiwanese firm Gold Apollo killed at least 12 people and injured more than 2,000.

  • @talEnglish
    6•6 hours ago

    I recently commented on NCD with a twelve-year-old, humorous-given-present-context review I found of that radio on eham, when apparently counterfeit IC-V82 radios were a serious problem:

    https://www.eham.net/reviews/view-product?id=5046

    Watch out for fake v82’s! Only buy from authorized retailers or someone who did.

    Words of wisdom there, eham.net.

    https://jpost.com/breaking-news/article-820808

    The walkie-talkies linked to explosions targeting the Hezbollah terrorist group that killed 20 people in Lebanon and injured hundreds of others could not have made the exploding devices, the Japanese company said on Thursday.

    “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.

    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.