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'Saboteurs' may have cut undersea internet cables, says UN agency
By Claudine Beaumont, Digital Channel Editor, and agencies
Last Updated: 5:01pm GMT 19/02/2008

The specialist team investigating the damage to several undersea internet cables that caused web and telecoms outages across the Middle East and Asia said it could have been an act of sabotage.

"We do not want to pre-empt 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.

In all, five cables were damaged between late January and early February, and speculation has been mounting that such a series of failures was too much of a coincidence to have been an accident.

Damage to one of the cables has been officially attributed to a ship's anchor, which sliced through the Falcon cable in the sea between Oman and the United Arab Emirates on February 7.

The cause of damage to the other four cables remains a mystery, particularly as the cables involved lie are deep-lying undersea cables specifically placed in areas with very light shipping traffic.

According to Stephan Beckert, a director of research with consulting firm TeleGeography, about 65 per cent of cable disruptions are caused by fishing nets, a further 18 per cent by stray anchors, and the remainder by earthquakes and other geological events.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml?xml=/connected/2008/02/19/dlcable119.xml