Kremlin warns Lebanon pager attack could spark wider Middle East conflict

MOSCOW (Reuters) – The Kremlin warned on Wednesday that an attack on Lebanon’s Hezbollah group and other groups using explosive pagers could become a trigger for a wider regional conflict and called for its perpetrators to be identified as part of an investigation.

Tuesday’s attack saw thousands of pagers explode across Lebanon, killing nine people and wounding nearly 3,000 others, including the group’s fighters and the Iranian envoy to Beirut.

A senior Lebanese security source and another source told Reuters that Israel’s Mossad spy agency had planted explosives inside 5,000 pagers imported by the Lebanese group Hezbollah months before Tuesday’s detonations.

“What happened, whatever it was, certainly leads to an escalation of tensions. The region (the Middle East) itself is in an explosive state, and an incident like this, any of them, has the potential to trigger an uncontrollable situation,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters.

“Of course, we believe that a thorough investigation into this incident must be conducted, that the causes and circumstances of what happened must be established and, of course, that the people behind these massive explosions of communications equipment must be identified,” he said.

The findings of such an investigation would allow specialists to eliminate the risk of a similar situation occurring in Russia or elsewhere, Peskov added.

The Russian Foreign Ministry said earlier Wednesday that the attack was an act of hybrid war against Lebanon in which it said thousands of innocent people were injured.

“It appears that the organizers 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,” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said in a statement.

(Reporting by Dmitry Antonov; Writing by Lucy Papachristou and Andrew Osborn; Editing by Andrew Osborn)