Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Iran

After the third cable cut, I heard from friends in a position to know on this one; that it was near certain they were deliberate cuts, probably by Iran.

Now the ITU is basically confirming it... though they don't absolutely confirm it (and probably never will), the chances this was anything but deliberate are basically zero.


Sea cable snappage was sabotage

Middle eastern cables destroyed deliberately

THE International Telecommunication Union has claimed that a spate of telecommunication outages to the Middle East were the result of sabotage.

Five undersea cables were damaged causing huge disruption to Internet and telephone services in the Middle East and south Asia.

Union spokesman Sami al-Murshed, told AFP said that while there was still an ongoing investigation into the incidents it would seem that there was a deliberate act of sabotage.

While it was possible that one cable could have been damaged by a ship's anchor the others were too deep. Besides the chances of five cables being cut within a two week period was unlikely.

Murshed said on the sidelines of a conference on cyber-crime held in Gulf state of Qatar that the cables lie at great depths under the sea and are not passed over by ships.