A 49-year-old Italian-Hungarian woman has found herself at the centre of a row around the coordinated pager attack in Lebanon that targeted Hezbollah members, killing at least 12 people and injuring thousands more.
As the listed CEO of Budapest-based BAC Consulting, Cristiana Barsony-Arcidiacono has been thrust into the spotlight due to her firm’s ties to the explosive pagers after a Taiwanese firm, Gold Apollo, said it had authorised the Hungary-based company to use its name on the pagers that blew up.
Barsony-Arcidiacono has received unspecified “threats” in the days since and has been advised by the Hungarian secret services “not to talk to media,” her mother told The Associated Press on Friday. Her mother said that her daughter was “not involved in any way” in the deadly plot to turn the pagers into explosive devices, and that “she was just a broker.” “The items did not pass through Budapest. … They were not produced in Hungary,” she said, echoing a Hungarian government claim from earlier in the week.
Who Is Barsony-Arcidiacono?
Born in Sicily, she grew up in a family with a working father and a housewife mother in Santa Venerina, near Catania. She attended high school nearby and was described by a schoolmate as a quite reserved youngster. Her academic achievements are impressive. In the early 2000s, she earned her PhD in particle physics from University College London, where she studied positrons, a subatomic particle. Her dissertation remains available on the UCL website, but she appears to have left without pursuing a scientific career. According to one of her professors at UCL, Akos Torok, she has not done scientific work since then.
Top Education
Barsony-Arcidiacono’s resume also includes references to other post-graduate degrees in politics and development from the London School of Economics and the School of Oriental and African Studies, news agency Reuters reported but could not independently verify. She also listed several jobs she worked on NGO projects in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. One of her former employers, Kilian Kleinschmidt, a veteran ex-UN humanitarian administrator, hired Barsony-Arcidiacono in 2019 to run a six-month programme to train Libyans in Tunisia.
However, after disagreements about how she managed staff, he let her go before her contract was over, which Reuters could not independently verify. Despite her diverse background, Barsony-Arcidiacono has not settled down in any particular career path. An acquaintance of hers in Budapest, who asked not to be identified, called her “Good-willed, not a business type” and someone who is always enthusiastic to try something new and readily believed things.
Mystery Woman
Barsony-Arcidiacono’s personal life also paints an intriguing picture. She owns an apartment in Budapest plastered with her own pastel drawings of nudes, and she practiced her drawing as part of a Budapest art club, though she hadn’t attended for a couple of years, according to the organiser of the group. A neighbour who has lived in the building for the past two years described her as kind, not loud, but communicative.
Since the pager attacks, Barsony-Arcidiacono has not appeared in public, and neighbors say they haven’t seen her. The Hungarian government has said that BAC Consulting was a “trading-intermediary company” with no manufacturing site in the country and that the pagers had never been to Hungary. However, Barsony-Arcidiacono’s role in the controversy remains unclear, and she has not made any public statements since the attacks.
(With agency inputs)
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