– The most realistic thing is that you have managed to hack into the pagers and somehow managed to short-circuit the batteries, says Skøien. He works at the Norwegian Armed Forces’ Ammunition and EOD school and last year received the defense medal with a laurel branch for his work with explosives. Skøien makes the statement after at least eight have been killed and several thousand injured after pagers belonging to Hezbollah members and others exploded in Lebanon on Tuesday. Three different security sources told Reuters that the pagers that exploded were of the latest model and that Hezbollah had received them in recent months. Skøien says that if we are talking about lithium batteries, they contain an awful lot of energy. – If all that energy is released at once, i.e. by a short circuit, then they get something that appears to be an explosion. says Skøien. He adds that even if high explosives are not necessarily involved, there will be a violent discharge of energy in a very short time, which could produce similar effects as high explosives. The remains of one of the exploded pagers. Photo: TELEGRAM/QUDSNET Could be explosives The other possibility he envisions is that someone has smuggled high explosives into the pagers. In that case, it will be about military explosives such as C4, Semtex or Pentritt with high explosive power. – It could be about 20, maybe 30 grams of explosives in a pager, says Skøien. news has also been in contact with other experts with extensive experience in handling explosives. They also say that the lithium battery theory is the most likely. People gathered outside a hospital in Beirut where many of the injured had been taken. Photo: Reuters Different types of damage According to Skøien, batteries and explosives will cause slightly different types of damage. – When using high explosives, you will get pressure damage to a much greater extent, and burn damage to a lesser extent. But if you get an energy release from a lithium battery, you will get more burns and less pressure injuries, he says. Skøien adds that the types of injuries people have received can give an indication of how the explosions happened. – The damage picture can probably be somewhat more extensive when using high explosives than lithium, he says. Alleged to have seen smoke and felt heat Eyewitnesses tell several media that the pagers are said to have become hot and given off smoke before exploding. Residents of South Beirut told the New York Times that they saw smoke coming from people’s pockets and then an explosion. Sources close to Hezbollah told the Wall Street Journal that some felt the pagers overheated and threw them away before they exploded. Published 17.09.2024, at 18.03 Updated 17.09.2024, at 18.14
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Think the battery in the pagers may have been hacked so it exploded – news Urix – Foreign news and documentaries
