Exploding pagers: Brit-educated woman linked to Hezbollah attacks 'goes into hiding'

Authorities are hunting a business woman educated in the UK over the series of synchronised exploding pager attacks in Lebanon.

Cristiana Bársony-Arcidiacono has been linked to Tuesday's attacks on Hezbollah after reports she supplied the pagers to Israeli intelligence agency, Mossad, and has not appeared publicly since. The attacks, which killed at least 37, including two children, and wounded nearly 3,000 others have been widely attributed to Israel.

The AR-924 pagers were being used by Hezbollah members when they simultaneously exploded on Tuesday. While under the Taiwanese brand Gold Apollo, the devices were manufactured by BAC Consulting KFT, based in the Hungarian capital of Budapest.

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Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono, 49, was in hiding guarded by the Hungarian secret service, her mother Beatrix claimed speaking from her home in Sicily. She told reporters her daughter had received unspecified threats and was now being "protected by agents of the Hungarian government".

The 70-year-old said her daughter was not knowingly involved in the plot, but "just a broker". "The items did not pass through Budapest ... They were not produced in Hungary," she previously said. The mother told MailOnline however she had been advised not to talk to media "by the Hungarian secret services".

Officials in Budapest however have denied Beatrix's claims. Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono claimed on her LinkedIn profile to have been educated in political science at top UK university London School of Economics (LSE) as well as having a PhD in physics from UCL. LSE however said it did not run diplomas in politics in the years she claimed she was there.

Speaking to US journalists earlier this week, Ms Bársony-Arcidiacono denied involvement in the plot, claiming: "I don't make the pagers. I am just the intermediate." The synchronised blasts are part of a ramping up in aggression in the Middle East following Hamas' October 7 attacks, which have since seen huge-scale violence against Palestinians in what Israel claims is self-defence.

Israel has neither confirmed nor denied the walkie-talkie blasts, although CBS News reports US officials were alerted by Israel around 20 minutes before the operation in Beirut.