Taiwanese company Gold Apollo said on Wednesday it had given permission for its trademark to be used on the beepers that exploded across Lebanon on Tuesday and Syria. But it said the devices used by members of the Hezbollah group were actually produced and sold by Bac Consulting KFT, a company based in Budapest, Hungary.

Thousands of pagers owned by Hezbollah members exploded almost simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, killing at least 12 people and wounding 2,750, according to Lebanon’s health minister.

“We authorize BAC to use our brand for product sales in designated regions, but the design and production of the products are the sole responsibility of BAC,” Gold Apollo said in a statement on its website. “Regarding the AR-924 pager model mentioned in the recent media reports (about Lebanon), we clarify that this model is produced and sold by BAC.”

Hsu Ching-kuang, founder and CEO of Gold Apollo, told NPR on Wednesday that “there was nothing in those devices that we had produced or exported to them (BAC).”

The pagers “were completely different” from Gold Apollo’s designs and used a chip that Gold Apollo does not use in its own models, Hsu said.

Hsu told NPR that the relationship between Gold Apollo and Bac Consulting began three years ago and he described the Hungarian company’s money transfers as “odd.”

Bac Consulting paid Gold Apollo from a bank account in the Middle East, which was frozen at least once by Gold Apollo’s Taiwanese bank, Hsu said.

“It was very inconvenient,” he told NPR, adding: “You have to deal with those kinds of risks when you’re trading globally.”

Corporate records accessed by CBS News from the Hungarian Ministry of Justice show that Bac Consulting was registered as a company in May 2022.

Footage widely circulated on social media showed the explosions striking seemingly unsuspecting Hezbollah members across Lebanon. The CBS News Confirmed team has verified the location of a video showing a man’s bag exploding as he looked at fruit on display at a supermarket in Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. There were several other shoppers around him, but no one appeared to be hit near the hip by the blast.

A statement from Hezbollah, a powerful Iranian-backed militant group and political faction based in Lebanon, confirmed that the pager explosions had targeted its members. It placed the blame firmly on Israel and promised a “harsh response that the criminal enemy must expect for the carnage it has wrought.”

It is not yet clear exactly how many Hezbollah beacons were detonated on Tuesday. But a senior Lebanese security official and another source told Reuters that Israel’s Mossad intelligence agency had planted a small amount of explosives in 5,000 of the devices, which they said had been ordered by Hezbollah months before the explosions.

The devices were “brought into the country (Lebanon) in the spring,” the security source told Reuters.

A delegation of Israeli lawmakers visited Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen in April with the aim of “leveraging our industrial strength and further deepening our partnership,” according to a statement issued by the Taiwanese president’s office at the time.

While Israeli officials have not publicly commented on the explosions, a U.S. official told AP that Israel briefed the U.S. on the operation Tuesday after it ended. U.S. officials have said the U.S. had no prior knowledge of the operation and was not involved.

CBS News reached out to Budapest-based Bac Consulting for comment on where and how its devices are manufactured and sold. As of press time, the company had not received a response, either by phone or email.

The company’s LinkedIn profile makes no mention of manufacturing services, describing its work as “business consulting and services.”

The company’s listed CEO is Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono. Her personal LinkedIn profile states that she has worked in a number of previous roles, including positions at the European Commission, UNESCO and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Zoltán Kovács, a spokesman for Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, responded in a text message to CBS News by saying that the Hungarian leader’s office had “no knowledge/information on the matter.”

The AR-924 pager model was advertised by Gold Apollo as a “rugged” device. They require a lithium battery, according to the product’s advertisement on Gold Apollo’s website. That advertisement has been removed from the Taiwanese company’s website.