Space News have reported that the six months of jamming suffered by a Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications satellite in 2006 was engineered by the Libyan government in an attempt to prevent cigarette smugglers’ use of satellite phones.

Thuraya Satellite Telecommunications are a United Arab Emirates company based in Abu Dhabi. The Libyan government is one of their major share holders. Apparently the jamming was only intended to disrupt the communications of smugglers working in Libyan waters.

The jamming incident was not the first in the commercial sector, but does appear to be one of the most systematic:

In perhaps one of the most persistent jamming events ever recorded in the commercial satellite sector, Libyan nationals operating from three widely separated locations inside Libya—at least one of them a restricted military site—compromised the L-band communications signals from Thuraya for more than six months in 2006, officials said. [Space News]

Diplomatic efforts on the part of the United Arab Emirates government eventually persuaded the Libyan government to stop the jamming.

The Space News article also mentions some of the preceeding cases involving jamming of commercial satellites:

In Asia, both APT Satellite Holdings Ltd. and AsiaSat of Hong Kong have suffered the occasional TV-signal hijacking by groups believed to be in support of the Falun Gong dissident group in China.

In France, operators of the French Syracuse military telecommunications system say their satellites’ signals in the Middle East have been subject to attempted jamming. [Space News]

[from Space News]

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