By Lery Hiciano / Staff writer, with CNA

An undersea cable to Penghu County has been severed, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said today, with a Chinese-funded ship suspected of being responsible.

It comes just a month after a Chinese ship was suspected of severing an undersea cable north of Keelung Harbor.

The National Communications and Cyber Security Center received a report at 3:03am today from Chunghwa Telecom that the No. 3 cable from Taiwan to Penghu was severed 14.7km off the coast of Tainan, the Ministry of Digital Affairs said.

Photo copied by Chiu Chun-fu, Taipei Times

The Coast Guard Administration (CGA) upon receiving a report from Chunghwa Telecom began to monitor the Togolese-flagged Hong Tai (宏泰) freighter anchored near the cable, the CGA said in a news release.

The ship was in the area from Saturday at about 7:10pm to around the time when Chunghwa Telecom reported that the cable had been severed, it said.

When the CGA received another report at 3am that the cable had been severed and that external force could have been responsible, it said it stopped the vessel and called for reinforcements.

Photo courtesy of the Coast Guard Administration

Although coast guard personnel could not board and inspect the ship due to a difference in height, it was escorted back to port in Tainan, where prosecutors have started their investigation after detaining the crew, it said.

Despite flying Togo’s flag, Hong Tai is Chinese-owned and all eight crew members on board are Chinese, the CGA said.

Furthermore, the ship’s automatic identification system name does not match what it identified itself as over the radio or what is written on the hull, the CGA said.

After the cable was severed, the digital ministry ordered the company to redirect traffic to other cables connecting Taiwan’s main island to its offshore islands.

The company was also instructed to add the cable to its repair schedule, coordinating with a repair vessel currently in Kaohsiung working to fix the previously damaged Taiwan-Matsu No. 2 and No. 3 cables.

Those two cables are expected to be fully completed by the end of this month and next month, respectively, with the cable connecting Penghu to be fixed afterward, the ministry said.

The ministry has submitted a report to the Executive Yuan labeling Taiwan’s undersea cables as critical infrastructure.

It also said it would move to strengthen Taiwan’s resilience to such issues by establishing more monitoring stations and subsidizing telecom operators’ capacity to repair cables and invest in backup communication infrastructure such as microwave systems.