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November 29, 2020012

By Staff Writer

St.Kitts and Nevis (WINN)- An EC10,000 reward is on offer for anyone who has information that leads to the conviction of the person/persons responsible for cutting fibre optic cables and disrupting the services of telecom providers The Cable and Digicel.

Telecom services were disrupted from close to 9 O’clock Saturday night (November 28) until 11:30 am Sunday (November 29).

“The way in which it was done, it is someone with not just knowledge of the way the fibre works, but knowledge of the network of The Cable,” the Chairman of the Board of Director of The Cable, Mr Otneil Heyliger told WINN when contacted Sunday afternoon.

The Chief Executive Officer of The Cable, Ms Pat Walters told WINN that brand new fibre installed on Thursday, after an outage on Wednesday, was deliberately destroyed around 9 o’clock Saturday night in St. Peters.

”  You can see that someone deliberately did it… it appears to be malicious,” Ms Walters told WINN.

Sunday morning, The Cable and Digicel jointly offered a reward of EC$10,000 to anyone with information that can lead to the identification and successful prosecution of the culprit(s).

” Regrettably, the sabotage to the company’s network has severely impacted the same customers in the areas of New Road, Lower and Upper Monkey Hill, northwards to Bayfords.  Customers of Digicel in St. Kitts and also in Nevis have been impacted as well,” the statement read.

The Cable warned that it was a criminal offence to damage its infrastructure, urged the perpetrators to cease and desist, and said it expects a full investigation from the police.

Mr Heyliger told WINN there was no theft of fibre or fibre equipment.

He was with the technical team around 6 am Sunday when the damaged cables were located, cut in two places about 200 yards apart.

It was the second attack on The Cable’s infrastructure last week.

” Wednesday of last week, a similar incident took place up in the New Road area where they cut the fibre. We were able to have it repaired by Thursday, so Friday it was all backup and running as normal and then last evening, at about nine 9’oclock, we realized that the fibre network went down again,” Mr Heyliger confirmed.

” I must say thanks to the team who came out this morning. We are n