Satellite-broadcasting experts said at the time that since Tehran could not jam the Telstar-12, due to its stationary position, it made the request for friendly Cuba to do it instead.
But on Wednesday a spokeswoman for the US State Department said that Havana had informed them that the jamming was made by the Iranians in Cuba, using a compound in a suburb of the capital belonging to the Iranian embassy.
According to a source, the Cubans have now shut down the facility and presented a protest note to the Iranian government in Tehran, and the jamming stopped earlier this month. "Cuba informed us on August 3 that they had located the source of the interference and had taken action to stop it," Jo-Anne Prokopowicz of the State Department said. "The government of Cuba informed us that the interference was coming from an Iranian diplomatic facility," she said, adding, "We will be following this up with Iran."
After denying that it was responsible for the jamming but pledging to investigate the US complaints in mid-July, Cuba told the US that it had found the source and that it had acted to stop it, she said.
The news surprised many Iranian observers, doubting Cuban leader Fidel Castro's "innocence" in the affair. "Being a fully police state, it is difficult to believe that the Iranians had introduced the sophisticated jamming equipment into Cuba without the knowledge of the Cuban authorities," Dr Shahin Fatemi, a veteran Iranian political analyst, told The Asia Times Online. ***