Night Vision Equipment: More Details

A report by Michael Evans in the London Times newspaper gives some more background to the discovery of military night-vision equipment in a bunker in Southern Lebanon. The Times has managed to locate the company that supplied similar equipment to Iran in 2003:

Sources at the firm, SDMS, of London, said that the published serial numbers on one of the kits found by the Israelis did not match any aspect of the contract that it had won to supply Iran with equipment for counter-narcotics operations on the Iranian-Afghan border.

The Israelis claimed that the equipment they had uncovered in a house in a village in southern Lebanon was for highly sophisticated military use. They confirmed that it was British, and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office promised a full investigation.

One source at the company, which is a distribution firm, not a manufacturer, said: “The kit we supplied was actually made in Russia, which makes some pretty rugged equipment. But they were not the sort of systems which the Israelis seem to be talking about.”