The name of an Indian engineer has now emerged in the investigation of thousands of pager explosion incidents across Lebanon. The 37-year-old Norwegian citizen, named Rinson Jose, was originally from Kerala, India. It is alleged that pagers from his Bulgarian company, Norta Global, were supplied to Hezbollah.
This information was reported by Indian news outlet NDTV on Saturday.
According to the report, Rinson was a resident of Kerala, India, before acquiring Norwegian citizenship. He owns a company in Bulgaria named Norta Global. Allegations suggest that the pagers involved in the explosions were supplied to Lebanon by Rinson’s company, although the pagers were manufactured by a Hungarian company. The company, Norta Global, is registered at an address in Budapest, Hungary, but was also registered in Sofia in 2022. The technology used to make the pagers came from Taiwan’s Gold Apollo. However, the suspicious pagers were purchased by Rinson’s company, Norta Global.
Earlier, a report by the American media outlet The New York Times stated that Hezbollah had imported the pagers from Hungary-based BAC Consulting, which was actually a Mossad-run company operating under a false identity. Such companies are referred to as “shell companies.”
Hezbollah had contracted Taiwan’s Gold Apollo to purchase the pagers manufactured by the Hungarian company. It was these Taiwanese-made pagers that exploded in Lebanon, and now the name of Indian-origin Rinson Jose has been linked to the incident.
Meanwhile, two days after the pager explosions, Bulgaria’s State Agency for National Security (DANS) announced that it would coordinate with the Ministry of Interior to investigate the role of the pager manufacturing company owned by Norwegian citizen Jian Rinson Jose.
Additionally, on Friday, DANS clarified that the pagers that exploded in Lebanon were neither exported from nor manufactured in Bulgaria. At the same time, the Norwegian police announced that they, too, had initiated a preliminary investigation into the pager explosion incidents.