(A) THAICOM-1A : C-Band Regional Beam
(B) THAICOM-2 : C-Band Regional Beam
(C) THAICOM-1A : Ku-Band Spot Beam (Thailand)
(D) THAICOM-2 : Ku-Band Spot Beam (Thailand)
source : thaicom.net
Thaicom announced on Wednesday it had ended satellite broadcasts by the Hezbollah propaganda TV channel al-Manar, a service which had brought worldwide protest.
"Shin Satellite would like to confirm that the company had already terminated the Al-Manar TV test signal from Thaicom on (last) Friday, January 11, 2008," said Shin Satellite Pcl (SatTel), the owner of Thaicom satellites.
The service said it had carried out "a transmission test" for al-Manar from Jan 9-11.
But Shin Satellite and other executives appeared to be scrambling on Wednesday after protests from several quarters.
A Shinsat executive told the Bangkok Post on Wednesday that al-Manar had leased a C-band VDO channel on Thaicom 5 for slightly over a month.
He said Shin Satellite has provided rental service for more than 200 channels.
He said the company monitored such channels only on the quality of image and sound, and especially to guard against pornography. It did not focus on contents because of a language barrier. "Our staff could not understand," the spokesman said.
Last week, Thaicom told the American agency The Media Line that the decision to broadcast Al-Manar TV had been a "purely business decision which had nothing to do with politics."
Piyanuch Sujpluem, a spokeswoman for SATTEL, told a newspaper (not the Bangkok Post) that the deal was terminated after the company discovered al-Manar "had connections to a terrorist group."
Al-Manar is the mouthpiece of Hezbollah - the Party of God - an Islamic Shiite group formed in Lebanon in the mid-1980s to fight the Israeli occupation of Lebanon. Hezbollah has been behind numerous suicide attacks against Israel, the US and other western targets.
Its TV service broadcasts hard-core Islamist programming, which is particularly anti-Jewish.
The US government in 2006 declared the al-Manar station a "terrorist entity." The US and other countries had taken other action, even prior to the terrorist designation, to impede al-Manar's operations.
AsiaSat ceased broadcasting al-Manar in 2005, and the Spanish government ordered the banning of Hezbollah TV broadcasts to Latin America via Hispasat.
In the decision to designate al-Manar TV in March, 2006, the US government said: "In addition to supporting Hezbollah, al-Manar has also provided support to other designated Palestinian terrorist organisations, including the Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) and al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, notably transferring tens of thousands of dollars for a PIJ-controlled charity."
The popular Counterterrorismblog.org website reported that in late 2006, two men were charged in the US with conspiring to support terrorists by enabling customers to obtain satellite broadcasts of al-Manar.
The blog demanded that, "The US State Department should make the removal of al-Manar from THAICOM a priority," but there was no indication on Wednesday that either the US, Thai or Singaporean government had been directly involved in the decision to axe al-Manar from Thaicom.
The Israel-based Intelligence and Terrorism Information Centre said Thaicom halted the an-Manar TV broadcasts "as the result of the public exposure of the services it was providing for Hezbollah."
SatTel owns all four broadcasting Thaicom satellites, called Thaicom 1, 2, 5 and iPSTAR.
Source : BangkokPost.com;Thursday, January 17, 2008
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