Say Anything Blog

A senior officer of the company, Acme Commerce Sdn Bhd, said on Thursday it was not aware of the site's content and that if it had known of the offensive material, it may have shut down the site anyway.

"We are a legitimate business, in no way related to al-Qaeda," said Alfred Lim, the firm's business manager. "We have no control over what our clients put on their websites."

The site, http://www.al-ansar.biz, was operated by a client who rented space on a Malaysian-based web server owned by Acme Commerce. Mr Lim said he was not immediately aware when the client began renting the space.

Mr Lim said Acme Commerce disabled the site on Thursday morning because it had attracted "a sudden surge of massive traffic that is taking up too much bandwidth and causing inconvenience to our other clients".

The video, which was posted on the site on Tuesday, showed the slaying of an American captive Nick Berg, 26, of West Chester, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia.

His body was found near a highway overpass in Baghdad on Saturday, the same day he was beheaded, a US official said.