It was an unusual and alarming day at work for the staff and neighbours of Gold Apollo, a Taiwanese tech company in an office park in a leafy district half an hour outside Taipei.
On the third floor of building “B”, dozens of media crowded the corridor outside Gold Apollo’s glass entrance, which was still festooned with leftover Lunar New Year decorations wishing for prosperity.
Inside, police officers sat at a table with the company’s chief executive and founder, Hsu Ching-kuang. On a whiteboard behind him was written: AR-924, the model number of pagers that had simultaneously exploded half a world away in an attack on Hezbollah members in Lebanon on Tuesday.
The blasts killed at least nine people, wounded 3,000 and further ratcheted up tensions in the Middle East.
Coverage of the regional crisis shifted to Taiwan, and Gold Apollo in particular, after images of the pagers emerged in the aftermath with stickers on the back that appeared to be consistent with pagers made by the company.
Earlier, Hsu found himself fronting international media to deny his company had made these pagers. He said they were made by a European company that had the right to use Gold Apollo’s branding. “This product was not ours,” he said. “We are a responsible company, this is very embarrassing.”
Gold Apollo was founded in 1995 by Hsu and now employs 40 people. On Wednesday, its website was inaccessible but the Guardian couldn’t confirm when it went down. An archived version from April showed a dedicated page for the AR-924 model, which Gold Apollo described as a “configurable, flexible design”.
As the morning stretched on, the crowd of press grew. A staffer stuck her head out of the door to promise a statement would come soon. Inside, a uniformed police officer flicked through a sheaf of papers with photos of the exploded pagers visible.
Hsu then emerged to make another statement to cameras, again denying this the Taiwan-based company had supplied the pagers, his voice shaking slightly.
As the media crowded around Hsu a security guard wandered over, picking up the printed statements left on the floor by some reporters, photographing them for his manager downstairs, who was concerned about the cause of the unusual scene.
Before long, the media spotlight moved on to Europe, leaving in its wake a confused-looking delivery driver who had showed up with a package for one of the Apollo Gold employees.