Suspected Sabotage Causes Massive Phone Outage

Santa Clara County officials have declared a local emergency after they said someone intentionally cut an underground fiber optic cable in south San Jose, causing a widespread phone service outage in southern Santa Clara and Santa Cruz counties today that included disruption to 911 emergency phone service.

John Britton, a spokesman for AT&T, said it appears somebody opened a manhole in South San Jose, climbed down eight to 10 feet and cut four or five fiber-optic cables.Britton also said there was a report of underground cables being cut in San Carlos.

AT&T is offering a $100,000 reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of whoever is responsible for the sabotage, Britton said.

The outage initially affected some cell phones, Internet access and about 52,200 Verizon household land lines in Morgan Hill, Gilroy and Santa Cruz County, according to the Santa Clara County Office of Emergency Services. The cell phone networks affected are Verizon, Nextel, Sprint and some AT&T.

Verizon is the sole provider of land lines in the South County area.

“We’ve never to this extent in recent history had this kind of phone outage,” said Gilroy police Sgt. Jim Gillio.

ATMs in South Santa Clara County were not working.

Saint Louise Regional Hospital in Gilroy cancelled all elective surgeries in response to the emergency, according to county officials.

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Animal Rights Activists Arrested For Terrorst Acts Against UC Scientists

Federal authorities have arrested four suspected animal rights activists in connection with violent protests in Santa Cruz and Alameda County, police reported Friday.

Three of the four were linked to the Riverside Avenue home police raided after the home invasion attack of a UC Santa Cruz researcher a year ago, according to Santa Cruz police spokesman Zach Friend.

Nathan Pope, 26, of Oceanside and Adriana Stumpo, 23, of Long Beach were arrested by the FBI and the Charlotte Joint Terrorism Task Force at an airport in Charlotte, N.C., Thursday when they returned to the U.S. from Costa Rica, police reported. They appeared in federal court in Charlotte on Friday.

The two other suspects – Joseph Buddenberg, 25, of Berkeley and Maryam Khejavi, 20, of Pinole – were arrested by the FBI, the San Francisco Joint Terrorism Task Force and UC Berkeley police Friday afternoon. Khejavi was arrested in Oakland and Buddenberg, the only one of the four not tied to the Riverside Avenue house, was arrested at the Alameda County Courthouse, according to authorities.

Santa Cruz Police Chief Howard Skerry said the arrests came “due to the tenacity of investigators,” but declined to speak specifically about the probe, evidence collected or any future arrests. Santa Cruz police were involved in the investigation, but the FBI was the lead law enforcement agency handling the case.

Still, he said he was pleased with the progress made in the past year.

“A lot of cases are very complex,” Skerry said. “We don’t give up on the cases. If it takes years, it takes years.”

Pope, Stumpo, Buddenberg and Khejavi will be charged at least in part under the federal Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, police said. The act carries a penalty of up to five years for each violation. It wasn’t immediately clear how many counts the suspected animal activists face. They are expected to appear in U.S. District Court later this month.

via Source