Suicide Concert Halted By Web Attack

A concert by Florida shock-rockers HELL ON EARTH which was to feature an on-stage suicide of a terminally ill person was postponed Saturday because of problems with the planned broadcast of the event over the Internet, according to The Associated Press.

The band's web site was attacked Saturday evening by a flood of data from computers somewhere in Hong Kong, said Jason Trindade, the operator of a San Diego-based technology company that hosts the site.

"There's been a huge amount of traffic which causes the server to lock up," Trindade said. "We can't handle that."

HELL ON EARTH leader Billy Tourtelot said Saturday morning the concert and suicide would take place that night in two separate, undisclosed locations in St. Petersburg. He wouldn't give any more details on the venues.

Trindade said he was told by Tourtelot that the performance would be postponed, possibly until next weekend.

Several attempts to reach Tourtelot on Saturday night were not immediately successful.

The band asked fans to visit its web page for the performance, but no video was shown. Instead, a link to another site appeared, as did the following message: "Next week the show will go on."

Trindade said the site was victimized by a denial-of-service attack, which is designed to hamper or shut down a computer system by flooding it with huge amounts of data. He did not immediately know how the site would address the problem.

Emergency dispatchers in St. Petersburg and Pinellas County reported they had no calls reporting a suicide nearly two hours after the event was to have taken place. In St. Petersburg, police were on alert for calls of a suicide or suspicious death, and for the flood of calls from media outlets tracking events.