The Norwegian police have dropped an investigation into a connection with September’s booby-trapped pager attack in Lebanon, which killed dozens of members of the terrorist group Hezbollah.
On Sep. 27, the Norwegian authorities issued an international wanted notice for Rinson Jose, 39, who left Oslo for the United States on Sept. 17, the same day the pagers exploded in Beirut, killing 42 people, including two children.
Jose was reportedly the owner of a Bulgarian company that was put under investigation in connection with the pager attack.
He had worked in sales at a Norwegian company, DN Media Group, which filed a missing persons case with the police.
But the Norwegian police closed the missing persons case on Nov. 5, after Jose contacted his employer, which owns Norway’s leading business newspaper, Dagens Næringsliv, and several other titles.
Norway’s PST security police force said on Monday it had found no grounds to continue investigating links between Norway and the exploding pagers.
PST lawyer Haris Hrenovica said in a statement, “PST’s overall assessment of the findings in the case indicates that there is no basis for initiating an ordinary investigation within our mandate.”
Netanyahu ‘Greenlighted’ Operation
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s spokesperson, Omer Dostri, said on Nov. 11, “Netanyahu confirmed Sunday [Nov. 10] that he greenlighted the pager operation in Lebanon.”On Sept. 17, thousands of pagers simultaneously exploded in Beirut’s southern suburbs and other Hezbollah strongholds, in most cases after the devices beeped to indicate an incoming message.
Dozens of Hezbollah terrorists were killed in the attack, often after suffering facial injuries when they looked at their beeping pagers.
Among the wounded was Iran’s ambassador to Lebanon. The Iranian regime backs and bankrolls Hezbollah.
The following day, another attack—also suspected to have been launched by Israel—killed at least 30 Hezbollah members as they attended the funerals of those killed by exploding pagers.
On that occasion, walkie-talkies being used by Hezbollah detonated.
Hezbollah operatives had been using pagers instead of phones as a low-tech means of communication in an attempt to avoid Israeli location tracking.
The investigation into the pager attack has spanned the globe.
It quickly emerged that the devices that exploded were AR-924 pagers, which were sold by a Taiwanese company called Gold Apollo.
But on Sept. 19, the president of Gold Apollo, Hsu Ching-kuang, said he had outsourced production of the pagers to a company in Eastern Europe.
Hsu was later questioned by Taiwanese prosecutors.
‘Not Made in Taiwan’
Kuo said, “I can say with certainty they were not made in Taiwan.”On the same day, Bulgaria’s security agency, DANS, said it had “indisputably established” that no pagers used in the Lebanon attack were made or exported from Bulgaria.
The Hungarian government later said in a statement that the country’s intelligence services had conducted several interviews with the Italian Hungarian CEO of BAC Consulting, Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono, 49.
There is no evidence that Barsony-Arcidiacono was involved in the Israeli sabotage of the Hezbollah pagers.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government also said BAC Consulting was “a trading-intermediary company, which has no manufacturing or other site of operation in Hungary.”
