Server kills beheading website
2004-05-13 10:03
Kuala Lumpur - A Malaysian-based internet company that hosted the website that first posted a video of American civilian Nicholas Berg's beheading shut it down on Thursday because it was drawing too much traffic.
A senior officer of the company, Acme Commerce, said on Thursday it was not aware that the site, www.al-ansar.biz, may have been connected to al-Qaeda or that offensive material had been posted on it.
If it had, the company would likely have shut it down before now, said Alfred Lim, Acme Commerce's business manager.
"We are a legitimate business, in no way related to al-Qaeda," Lim saids. "We have no control over what our clients put on their websites."
The site was operated by a client who rented space on a Malaysian-based web server owned by Acme Commerce, Lim said, although he was not sure exactly when the client began renting the space.
Lim said Acme Commerce disabled the site on Thursday morning because it had attracted "a sudden surge of massive traffic that is taking up too much bandwidth and causing inconvenience to our other clients".
The video, which was posted on the site Tuesday, showed the slaying of an American captive Nick Berg. His body was found near a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday, the same day he was beheaded, a US official said.
Images from the video showing Berg and his captors just before the killing have dominated television broadcasts and newspaper front pages in many countries. Most news organisations edited the video to delete gruesome details of Berg's slaying.
Acme Commerce, which is based in a Kuala Lumpur suburb, has not yet investigated the site's content, but would "definitely not host this kind of website" again, Lim said.
The company's policy was not to host sites that carried grisly, defamatory, obscene, gambling or potentially offensive material, he said.
He declined to identify the client who ran the website, saying the company - which claims to host 5 000 sites for clients in more than 30 countries - wanted to consult its legal advisers on whether to make any further disclosures to the media.
The company had not contacted police so far about the site, and it was unclear what action Malaysian authorities might take.
Berg's killing came as anti-U.S. sentiment swelled with the publication of photographs showing Iraqis abused and humiliated at Abu Ghraib prison. The masked men who beheaded Berg claimed they were angered by abuses of Iraqi prisoners by occupying forces.
- AP