Turkey thwarted another attack with pagers in Lebanon last year - report

Turkey's National Intelligence Organisation (MIT) reportedly intercepted 1,300 weaponised pagers intended to kill or wound alleged Hezbollah members in Lebanon, just days after the Israeli pager attacks in September last year.

Details which emerged a year later revealed that 1,300 pager devices and 710 chargers rigged with explosives were seized from a cargo at Istanbul Airport on their way to Lebanon from Hong Kong.

The operation to seize the devices followed an Israeli attack that killed at least 51 people and wounded 3,000 others in Lebanon, including women, children and medics, after pagers and other wireless communication devices detonated.

Turkish outlet Sabah revealed that MIT had received details about the shipment and started inspecting ports and airports, leading them to discover that the delivery was set for 27 September.

Turkish authorities found that the shipment had arrived in Istanbul a day before the Lebanon explosions and weighed 850kg. The shipment consisted of 61 boxes and was labelled under the name of a shipment of food choppers.

Istanbul's prosecutor's office called for the shipment to be confiscated and for it to be transferred to a crime lab for further analysis after its authorities suspected it had bomb equipment in it.

Analysis later revealed that three grams of a white explosive material were placed inside each pager's battery clock, along with detonator fuses. Some batteries further contained a brown explosive material that was ‘injected’ into them while it was still in liquid metal form.

Experts in Turkey also found that the devices could be detonated remotely through signals or when they overheated.

Lebanon's former Prime Minister Najib Mikati reportedly thanked Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in December last year for thwarting the bomb plot, Turkish media reported.

The September pager attacks in Lebanon were particularly devastating due to their deceptive nature. The devices reportedly emitted a notification alert, causing victims to instinctively hold the pagers close to their faces to inspect the message, at which point the devices detonated.

The proximity of the blasts caused severe facial injuries, with shrapnel tearing into victims' eyes, resulting in widespread blindness and permanent disabilities.

In November last year, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu confessed to ordering the deadly pager explosions during a cabinet meeting.

Netanyahu also last month gifted US Senator John Fetterman a silver-plated pager, in celebration of the attack. In a video shared by the prime minister's office, Fetterman said that he "loved" the operation in which Israel launched a coordinated attack against Hezbollah.

Last week, Israel honoured three masked Mossad operatives for their role in the deadly and indiscriminate operation.