A court in Taiwan sentenced a Chinese ship captain to three years in jail on Thursday for intentionally damaging undersea communications cables.
The captain, identified by his surname Wang, was detained in February after a submarine cable between Taiwan and the Penghu Archipelago was severed.
Penghu, also known as the Pescadores Islands, is a cluster of about 90 small islands in the Strait of Taiwan, roughly 25 nautical miles west of Taiwan’s main island. The islands are administered as a county of Taiwan. They are a significant tourist destination, renowned for their natural beauty.
Taiwan is heavily dependent on two dozen undersea cables for telecommunications with the outside world, and China has been waging a campaign of quiet sabotage against those cables for years. There have been several major instances of cables breaking down shortly after Chinese fishing vessels were anchored nearby. Chinese ships often carry anchors that appear to have been designed for cutting undersea cables.
Beijing invariably dismisses the cable cuts as bad luck and Taiwan has generally avoided a confrontation on the sabotage until now. The cable cuts tend to be difficult and expensive to repair, because Taiwan usually hires repair ships from other countries to perform the work, and the challenging repair operations are highly vulnerable to bad weather.
In February, Taiwan detected a break in the cable to Penghu about nine miles from the coast. When the Taiwanese Coast Guard investigated, it discovered a Togo-flagged, Chinese-owned ship called the Hong Tai 58 anchored near the broken cable. The ship did not respond to signals from Taiwanese authorities.
The Coast Guard intercepted the ship and escorted it back to a port in Taiwan, where Captain Wang and his eight-man crew were detained. All of the crew members were Chinese nationals.
“The possibility of this being part of a gray-zone incursion by China cannot be ruled out,” the Taiwanese Coast Guard said at the time.
On Thursday, a district court in southern Taiwan found Wang guilty of violating the Telecommunications Management Act by ordering two of his crew members to drop the Hong Tai’s anchor in a prohibited area. The anchor did not find purchase in the seabed, so the Hong Tai drifted until its anchor caught the telecom cable and “completely severed” it.
Wang admitted to negligence in dropping anchor, but claimed it was not an act of intentional sabotage. He claimed he dropped anchor in rough seas without knowing he was close to one of Taiwan’s submarine cables, but prosecutors introduced as evidence electronic chargers from the Hong Tai that showed the captain knew exactly where he was.
The Taiwanese Coast Guard testified that the ship did not move in circles around its anchor, but was instead dragging the anchor laterally across the ocean floor in a zigzag pattern.
The prosecution described the Hong Tai as a “highly suspicious” vessel, noting that it had only one recorded cargo during the past year, has been renamed several times, and was in poor shape to be sent on transits through the Strait of Taiwan.
Prosecutors said Wang was the first Chinese captain to be charged with deliberately severing an undersea cable. The rest of his crew was deported back to China without facing criminal charges.
The court said cable sabotage “seriously interferes with the government and society’s operations.”
“The impact is enormous, and the defendant’s actions should be severely condemned,” the court declared.
Prosecutor Hsu Shu Han said there was no evidence that Captain Wang or his crew were in direct contact with Chinese authorities when they severed the cable, or were acting under orders from Beijing.
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