Members of Egypt’s coast guard have caught and arrested three divers who were severing an undersea internet cable in Alexandria in the Mediterranean yesterday.
Reuters reports that the arrest was confirmed by Egypt’s Army spokesman on their official Facebook page. The spokesman said “The armed forces foiled an attempt and arrested three divers while they were cutting a submarine cable.” No motive has been suggested for the attempted sabotage of the cable, which reportedly belonged to Egypt Telecom, Egypt’s version of Telkom.
The arrest has sparked some speculation that the attempted cable sabotage may have been related to the Seacom outage that affected South Africa and other regions last week but there is no sign that the two incidents are related. Seacom’s explanation for the outage was that “we suspect…that the most likely cause is external aggression to the cable most probably caused by a larger vessel dragging its anchor across the sea bed.”
Source: Reuters