Telephone and internet links were severed to Libya's flood-hit city of Derna, a day after hundreds protested there against local authorities they blamed for the thousands of deaths.
A tsunami-sized flash flood broke through two ageing river dams upstream from the city on the night of September 10 and razed entire neighbourhoods, sweeping untold thousands into the Mediterranean Sea.
Protesters massed on Monday at the city's grand mosque, venting their anger at local and regional authorities they blamed for failing to maintain the dams or to provide early warning of the disaster.
"Thieves and traitors must hang," they shouted, before some protesters torched the house of the town's unpopular mayor.
Optical fibre rupture
On Tuesday, phone and online links to Derna were severed, an outage the national telecom company LPTIC blamed on "a rupture in the optical fibre" link to Derna, in a statement on its Facebook page.
The telecom company said the outage, which also affected other areas in eastern Libya, "could be the result of a deliberate act of sabotage" and pledged that "our teams are working to repair it as quickly as possible".
Rescue workers have kept digging for bodies, with the official death toll at around 3,300 but many thousands more missing since the flood sparked by torrential rains from Mediterranean Storm Daniel.
The huge wall of water that smashed into Derna completely destroyed 891 buildings and damaged over 600 more, according to a Libyan government report based on satellite images.
Libyan war
Oil-rich Libya was torn by more than a decade of war after a 2011 NATO-backed uprising led to the ouster and killing of Muammar Gaddafi.
Myriad militias, mercenary forces and insurgents battled for power, while basic services and the upkeep of infrastructure were badly neglected.
Libya remains split between a UN-backed and nominally interim government in Tripoli in the west, and another in the disaster-hit east backed by military strongman Khalifa Haftar.
