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By PETER SVENSSON
The Associated Press
Tuesday, March 25, 2003; 12:30 PM

Hackers attacked the Web site of Arab satellite television network Al-Jazeera on Tuesday, rendering it intermittently unavailable, the site's host said.

The newly launched English-language page, which went live Monday, was hardest hit in a bombardment of data packets known as a denial-of-service attack.

Ayman Arrashid, Internet system administrator at the Horizons Media and Information Services, the site's Web host, said the attack began Tuesday morning local time.

The Web host is based in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar. The servers that host the Al-Jazeera site are in France and the United States. Only the U.S. servers were under attack, said Arrashid, so the attackers were likely in the United States.

He said technicians were working to thwart the attack, but could not estimate when the site would be fully available again.

Al-Jazeera, also based in Qatar, is an unusually independent and powerful voice in the Arab world whose broadcasts of U.S. prisoners and war dead has angered many Americans. The English site carries at least one picture of a dead U.S. soldier.

Representatives of the broadcaster could not immediately be reached for comment.

In denial-of-service attacks, hackers normally send a deluge of false requests to Web servers, overloading them and making them unavailable to surfers.

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On the Net:

http://www.aljazeera.net

http://english.aljazeera.net