The batteries of the walkie-talkies used by Lebanon’s Hezbollah group that exploded contained pentaerythritol nitrate (PETN), a Lebanese source with knowledge of the device’s components told Reuters.
The way the explosive had been embedded in the battery box made it extremely difficult to trace, the source said. Hundreds of walkie-talkies used by members of the group exploded a day after Hezbollah blasted thousands of buzzers across Lebanon.
Photographs of the exploding walkie-talkies show ‘ICOM’ and ‘made in Japan’ written on them. Icom has announced that it has stopped production of these models for a decade and that most of those still available for sale are fakes.
Yoshiki Enomoto, general manager of Icom’s security and commercial division, told Reuters it was possible an older Icom device had been converted to make a bomb.
Placing an explosive device in the main body of the walkie-talkie would be difficult because the electronic components are very compressed there, so it is more likely that it was placed in the detachable battery box, Yoshiki Enomoto told Japan’s Fuji TV network.
The Lebanese source stated that the explosions took place even in cases where the battery box had been separated from the rest of the device’s body.
A Lebanese security source has told Reuters that the explosives placed on the Hezbollah bombers were difficult to detect.
Another source said up to three grams of explosives had been hidden in the new buzzers probably months before they exploded.
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