In one of the more ‘hands on’ examples of cyber-espionage we’ve seen in a while, Egypt’s military has reported that it’s managed to arrest three scuba divers in the process of trying to sever an undersea cable that connects the country to the World Wide Web.

Speaking on the Egyptian armed forces Facebook page, Colonel Ahmed Mohammed Ali, said that a navy patrol vessel caught the three men red-handed as they were working from an inflatable dinghy, attempting cut through the undersea cable, just north of the port city Alexandria. The claim was later verified by Telecom Egypt, the country’s largest telecommunications firm, on its official Twitter feed, and reported by several major news outlets.

The incident might help to explain the patchy internet speeds reported in Egypt and neighboring countries since last Wednesday. GigaOM’s Om Malik wrote a blog yesterday explaining how the undersea cable known as “South East Asia Middle East Western Europe 4” (SEA-ME-WE 4) suffered damage just last week. It occurred at a most unfortunate moment, when two other major cables were in ‘maintenance mode’. This resulted in disruption for internet service providers across Egypt and other countries in the Indian Ocean region, with India, Pakistan, South Africa, and Kenya all reporting problems. At the time, telecoms companies blamed the damage on a “shipping accident”, but in light of yesterday’s discovery, the possibility that the earlier cut was also sabotage cannot be ruled out.

Of course this begs the question – why on earth would anyone want to sabotage Egypt’s internet connection? There are certainly plenty of people around with a grudge against the country and its leaders, including political opponents of the Morsi government, Israel and Syria to name just a few, but it isn’t immediately clear what these could achieve by disconnecting the country’s internet access.

Egypt’s military hasn’t yet given any details on the men arrested nor any clues as to their motivation. As of now, the men are still being interrogated.

The good news at least is that internet services in Egypt are expected to be fully restored within the next 20 hours, according to Communications Minister Atef Helmy in an interview with Turkish agency Anadolu.