You Can Float, But You Can’t Hide

Remember this story that we covered about Middle East cable cuts? All 5 of them? Well it appears that there were 2 ships involved in the incidents.

Dubai authorities have impounded two ships suspected of damaging undersea telecom cables in the Middle East earlier this year. One of the ships has reportedly been released after paying for the damage. The cable cuts, which disrupted Internet traffic in much of the Middle East, India and Pakistan, sparked a flurry of conspiracy theories that the series of outages in the region were not a coincidence.

Reliance Globalcom, whose FLAG Telecom unit maintains the cables, contacted authorities after studying the satellite images of the ship movements around the area of undersea cable damage. The Hindu reports that Dubai Port Trust officials believe the two ships, MV Hounslow and MT Ann, improperly dropped anchor in the area. The cables then were damaged by “jerks and force of the ship(s)” the port said.

Nabbed via satellite. Novel approach. Next thing you know they will be putting red light signs up in the Straits of Hormuz. The story did not say as to where the vessels were doing this deliberately or simply acts of stupidity. You would think there would no anchor zones marked on charts. Or maybe there was. Mystery solved.

Linky.