“Taiwan said a Chinese vessel had damaged an underwater internet cable off the island’s northern coast, causing a temporary communications outage. Taiwan asked South Korea to detain the vessel.”, — write: www.pravda.com.ua
Taiwan said a Chinese vessel had damaged an underwater internet cable off the island’s northern coast, causing a temporary communications outage. Taiwan asked South Korea to detain the vessel.
Source: Financial Times
Details: The paper reports that the incident occurred on January 3 near the port of Keelung, where the Cameroonian-flagged cargo vessel Shunxing39 allegedly damaged an undersea cable that is part of the Trans-Pacific Express Cable System.
Although the vessel is owned by Jie Yang Trading Limited, a Hong Kong-registered company, its director is a mainland Chinese citizen, Guo Wenjie. Taiwan believes the incident may be part of a broader Chinese strategy to cut off the island’s external communications.
Taiwan is concerned that China could cut off the island’s external communications in a potential bid to annex the country. Beijing claims its sovereignty over the island and threatens to seize it by force if necessary.
“Since we have not been able to question the captain, we have asked the South Korean authorities to help with the investigation at the next port of destination of the vessel,” said a representative of the Taiwan Coast Guard.
Taiwan’s coast guard and other government officials said tracking data from the automatic vessel identification system and satellite data showed that the Shunxing39 had raised its anchor at the location where the cable was broken.
“This is another case of a very disturbing global trend of sabotage against submarine cables,” said a senior official of Taiwan’s national security service. “The ships involved in these incidents are usually outdated vessels, almost unusable for commercial activity. This vessel resembles those belonging to Russia’s ‘shadow fleet’,” he added.
Literally: “The Shunxing39 has been traversing waters near Taiwan’s northern coast since Dec. 1, according to vessel tracking and maritime analytics service provider MarineTraffic. The pattern of movement indicates that the cable damage was not an ‘innocent accident,'” the official said.
Chinese merchant or fishing vessels occasionally take part in some of the large-scale military exercises Beijing regularly conducts near Taiwan. Taipei is concerned that such operations in the “grey zone”, below the threshold of war, will make it difficult to defend against aggression, which could eventually turn into an open attack.”
For reference: Trans-Pacific Express – an underwater communication cable laid on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean connects China, South Korea, Taiwan and the USA. The length of the cable was 18 thousand kilometers, the cost of the project was half a billion dollars. The submarine Internet cable belongs to an international consortium, which includes the American operator AT&T, Japan’s NTT, Taiwan’s Chunghwa Telecom, South Korea’s Korea Telecom, and Chinese operators China Telecom and China Unicom.
Prehistory:
- In Finland, on Monday, December 2, a fiber optic cable connecting the country to Sweden was damaged, causing a large-scale communication failure.
- On November 18, the undersea communication cable between Finland and Germany was broken, the investigation into the reasons for the break continues.
- Finnish law enforcement officers, investigating damage to underwater power and information cables, found traces on the seabed, probably left by the anchor of the detained Eagle S tanker of the Russian shadow fleet.