ITU official tells reporter that damaged undersea cables could have been sabotaged
The operative words are: could have been.
As Agence France Press put it, “Five undersea cables were damaged in late January and early February leading to disruption to Internet and telephone services in parts of the Middle East and south Asia. There has been speculation that the sheer number of cables being cut over such a short period was too much of a coincidence and that sabotage must have been involved”.
So, an AFP journalist covering a conference on cyber-crime in Qatar asked one of the officials attending, Sami al-Murshed, head of development for the Geneva-based International Telecommunications Union (ITU), about this matter.
The ITU official replied: ” ‘We do not want to preempt the results of ongoing investigations, but we do not rule out that a deliberate act of sabotage caused the damage to the undersea cables over two weeks ago’, the UN agency’s head of development, Sami al-Murshed, told AFP. ‘Some experts doubt the prevailing view that the cables were cut by accident, especially as the cables lie at great depths under the sea and are not passed over by ships’, Murshed said”.
The AFP also wrote, in the same article, that “India’s Flag telecom revealed on February 7 that the cut to the Falcon cable between the United Arab Emirates and Oman was caused by a ship’s anchor. But mystery shrouds what caused another four reported cuts. The Falcon cable has since been repaired, along with the Flag Europe Asia (FEA) cable which was damaged off Egypt’s Mediterranean coast. The status of the remaining cable is still unclear”. The AFP report has been published here.
OK, the prevailing view, as this article says, is still that these nearly-simultaneous cuts to these cables was an accident.
It would take great technical skill and more to mount an operation to do such damage deliberately, and without really being noticed. No one has claimed responsibility, if it was sabotage.
But, even if it wasn’t, how could this have happened?
Filed under: Journalism and Journalists, United Nations Agencies and Programmes
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