[08/March/2010]

Translated by: Saba staff

Edited by Mahmoud Assamiee

SANA'A, Mar. 08 (Saba) –Police have recently arrested the biggest network has been stealing international phone calls from Tel Yemen, Yemeni public telecommunication company.

This network used to offer the call services illegally from Tele Yemen, the authorized company for the international phone calls in the country, a matter that caused great losses to the company.

The company received several complaints from its clients, especially the migrants who faced various problems while communicating with their families thinking that there was a fault in the company. These complaints were the leading threads to unearth the network. So when the company was checking up the problem, its engineers found out hijackers who played the company's role in offering the international phone call services.

Therefore, the company informed the Capital's Investigation Department. Investigation men in their turns detected the house, which was used by hijackers for stealing the calls. They also seized the equipments used to carry out this organized crime to loot the public funds, disturb the national security and reflect a bad image of a national renowned company.

Director of the Capital Investigation Department, Rezq Saleh al-Jawfi, who assumed the responsibility to follow the case, told Saba that they had charged a group of detectives to disclose the case threads as soon as they received the company's notification. The detectives approved their trustworthy as they could define the house within 21 days.

So they informed the general prosecution and got the permission to break into the house. The mission has been done successfully.

Initial information revealed that a person out of the three members making up the gang was arrested.

The captured person, who is considered the main responsible member of the gang, and the high technological equipments were sent to the Investigation Department to be turned over to the Specialist Penal Prosecution, he added, confirming launching a hunt for the rest.

However the highly used technology indicates that non-Yemenis stand behind this crime, investigations would be continued in cooperation with engineers from Tele Yemen to bring the hijackers to justice by using the stored information in the seized computers, al-Jawfi said.

"These illegal acts caused great losses to the state's budget because the network was receiving and transferring more than 180 international calls per minute as they were controlling the greatest portion of these calls," al-Jawfi further said.

For his part, the Director of Engineering Department in Tele Yemen Abdul-Rahman al-Matari clarified that the hijackers used a new technology to compress the calls to be received in bad quality which contradicts the company's services and affects its reputation.

Over how the network was discovered, al-Matari said the company was receiving notifications and claims from persons conducting calls to Yemen and during these calls they were hearing immoral recordings thinking that these recordings were from international calls.

Moreover, they used the high technology to enter the satellite or the net so that the calls get out through GSM number which is not controlled by Tele-Yemen Company, al-Matari said.

Communication Corporation depends on the international phone calls to finance the communication projects in the rural areas so, the illegally use of this service cause a big loss of the public funds.

"The illegal usage of telecommunication services causes great losses in public fund as the telecommunication corporation is a main source to financing projects in rural areas and depends mainly on international calls in this process," explained al-Matari.


He pointed that this operation would contribute in returning the looted money, confirming that this Tele-communication problem has been fixed.

These illegal acts are not restricted on particular country; they variously exist in different development countries which are unable to control them because they are conducted so secretly. Available information shows that the smuggling operations started in 1998.

Although this illegal act caused the company a huge economical damage, concerned bodies have already started fighting hijackers since 1998 and decreased the loss volume by increasing the consumed international calls daily minutes which increased in 2003 from 700 thousand to a million.

Almost 200 thousand minutes are used illegally at a cost of $ 25-30 thousand daily and that caused the company and the Ministry of Telecommunication and Information Technology great losses.




Saba