But he said that this time, no explanation appeared until Monday, when a message on one of the sites said that it would be up and running again shortly after a few more "tweaks."
Kohlmann said that the outages began roughly around the time of two potentially significant recent events: the arrest in Spain of a suspect who some investigators believe was an administrator for some militant websites, and the shootout in Toulouse, France in which Mohammed Merah, a militant who shot dead a rabbi, three children and three French soldiers, was himself killed by police.
Kohlmann said speculation in the online world was that the forums had gone offline because they were attacked by government or non-official hackers of some kind.
The outages of al Qaeda-linked sites were first reported by the Washington Post.
A person familiar with U.S. government monitoring of militants said that because U.S. authorities have erected legal barriers severely restricting the launching of offensive cyber-attacks by U.S. agencies, it was unlikely the U.S. government played a role in the militant websites' current outages.
(Editing by Warren Strobel and Anthony Boadle)
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