A ship's captain is convicted for severing a cable
A district court in Tainan sentenced the captain of the cargo vessel Hong Tai 58 to three years' imprisonment for deliberately damaging the Taiwan–Penghu No. 3 cable in February 2025, having found that the ship entered a marked no-anchor zone and dragged an anchor across the cable. The vessel had operated under several names. It is reported as the first conviction anywhere for deliberately severing a submarine cable, which says less about the frequency of such acts than about how rarely jurisdiction, evidence and political will have coincided.
Historical — it happened, and the record is settled.
Subjects
- The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea · treaty · not located
Evidence
Partly verified — Core facts are sourced; some optional detail is deliberately absent.
Taiwan submarine cable incidents, 2023 and 2025, and the Hong Tai 58 judgment
Supports the 2023 Matsu cable cuts and their consequences — about 13,000 residents on a 2.2 Gbps microwave backup against 8–9 Gbps of normal demand, and roughly 50 days to repair — and the June 2025 conviction reported as the first of its kind. V55 verification basis: journalism retrieved in summary; no court document was consulted, and the attribution of the 2023 cuts to specific Chinese vessels is the Taiwanese authorities' account as reported.
Contemporary reporting including The Diplomat, Focus Taiwan, Taipei Times and Al Jazeera · Partly verified
Reporting of the February 2023 severing of both Matsu cables and the resulting 50-day repair, and of the Tainan District Court judgment of 12 June 2025 sentencing the captain of the Hong Tai 58 to three years for damaging the Taiwan–Penghu No. 3 cable
Recorded on The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
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- A ship's captain is convicted for severing a cable
Related
Related because they share a subject in the Atlas — never because the text looks similar.
- Cables and a power link are damaged in the Baltic Sea · 2024-11-17 – 2024-12-25