The Hindu Business Line : Cable cut: Bloggers smell conspiracy

New Delhi, Feb. 5 A week after Internet services were disrupted due to cuts on four under-sea cables, no one still knows exactly what caused the damage. While Egyptian Government authorities ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships dragging their anchors, Reliance-owned FLAG maintained that the cut was caused due to the heavy movement of re-routed ships following bad weather off the Egyptian coast, in the eastern Mediterranean.

Egypt’s Transport Ministry, in a statement, said that footage recorded by onshore video cameras of the cable locations showed no maritime traffic in the area when the cables were damaged. “The area is also marked on maps as a no-go zone and it is therefore ruled out that the damage to the cables was caused by ships,” the statement said.

The Egyptian authorities will file a final report after investigations are carried out to

Meanwhile, blogs and postings by Netizens across the globe are hinting at conspiracy theories ranging from it being an act of terrorist groups to a covert operation by the US Navy.

A posting by San Antonio-based Dr Richard Sauder said, “I will say upfront that I am well and thoroughly sceptical of the ‘ship anchor’ explanation that has been so prominently advanced in the mainstream news media. Yes, ships do sometimes drag their anchors and dragging anchors can cause damage, true enough. But to have three undersea cables — or is it actually four cables? — cut in the same region in just a two-day span, strains credulity; the more so, when we look at how the damage has played out across the region.”

Probe on

Some of the blogs said that Iranians and terrorists were to gain the maximum by the disruption. Then there are also bloggers, born during the pre-Internet era, who wrote that it was good to go back once again to days without Internet.

Meanwhile, a team of 30, including a naval officer, telecom engineers, project managers and Egyptian Government officials, arrived on a repair ship at the FLAG Europe-Asia site.

The disruption affected more than 85 million Internet and phone users in India, Pakistan, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Sudan, Egypt and the UAE.

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