MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin warned on Wednesday that an attack on Lebanese group Hezbollah and others using exploding pagers could become a trigger for a wider regional conflict and called for its perpetrators to be identified in an investigation.
Tuesday’s attack saw thousands of pagers detonate across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and Iran’s envoy to Beirut.
A senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that Israel’s Mossad spy agency planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations.
“What happened, whatever it was, certainly leads to an escalation of tension. The region (the Middle East) itself is in an explosive state, and certainly an incident like this, each one of them, has the potential to be a trigger for the situation to spiral out of control,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.
“Of course, we believe that a thorough investigation of this incident should be conducted, the causes and circumstances of what happened should be established, and of course, those behind these mass explosions of communications equipment should be identified,” he said.
The conclusions of such an investigation would allow specialists to eliminate the risk of something similar happening in Russia or elsewhere, added Peskov.
Russia’s Foreign Ministry said earlier on Wednesday that the attack was an act of hybrid war against Lebanon in which it said thousands of innocent people had been hurt.
“It appears that the organisers of this high-tech attack deliberately sought to foment a large-scale armed confrontation in order to provoke a major war in the Middle East,” Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, said in a statement.
(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Lucy Papachristou and Andrew Osborn; Editing by Andrew Osborn)