The Swedish Minister of Civil Protection, Carl-Oskar Bohlin, has revealed that ship movements have been detected that correspond in time and space with the breaks of two submarine cables in the Baltic Sea.
“The Coast Guard and the Swedish Armed Forces have been able to determine with the help of their sensors that There are ship movements above these locations that correspond in time and space with the breaks,” he told the TT agency.
Bohlin did not want to comment on the ships involved, but both Danish and Swedish media have reported that the Danish navy has escorted a Chinese cargo ship coming from the Russian port of Ust-Luga on its way out of the Baltic.
According to maritime traffic data from open sources, the Yi Peng 3 passed through the points where breaks in both cables were recorded in Swedish waters at the time they are believed to have occurred, at 8:00 GMT on Sunday and at 2:00 GMT on Monday.
“The Danish Army can confirm that We are present in the area near the Chinese ship Yi Peng 3. The Danish Army will not provide any further comments at this time,” the institution reported on social media.
“If the immediate assessment is that it is sabotage and that it comes from outside, then obviously it’s something serious. “I am not surprised that this could happen,” said the Danish Prime Minister, in statements collected by the Ritzau agency.
by the authorities of several countries who work on the case and that the national navy is thoroughly investigating their role. The Chinese ship It was heading from a Russian oil port when it passed through the fiber cables in question. This media’s review of openly available data shows that the ship was in the vicinity of the sites of the two cable breaks at the same time that Internet connections were interrupted.
The information is added that since these incidents occurred, Military ships of NATO countries have followed the journey of the Chinese ship from the Baltic Sea and, according to information from SVT, the ship has also been in the eyes of the authorities swedish.
open investigation
Meanwhile, the Swedish Navy has begun investigating the scene and according to Bohlin The seabed will begin to be analyzed “in the very near future”.
The two damaged submarine connections run between Finland and Germany and between Sweden and Lithuania, respectively, and all the countries involved have expressed with more or less caution the suspicion that it could be an act of sabotage.
Finland and Sweden have launched a joint investigationwhile the Lithuanian Prosecutor General’s Office opened proceedings this Tuesday for a possible act of terrorism.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the German Ministry of the Interior, Cornelius Funke, stated this Wednesday at the Government’s regular press conference that the German Federal Police is in contact with the Finnish and Swedish authorities and has offered his help to clarify the facts. “But as far as we’re concerned, the research is there” in Finland and Sweden, he stressed. The German Defense Minister, Boris Pistorius, pointed out this Tuesday that it could be an act of “hybrid warfare” by Russia.
The events are reminiscent of the damage suffered by the underwater gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia last year, which is being clarified by those two countries in an investigation that focuses on the accidental or deliberate role that the Newnew Polar Bear may have playeda Chinese ship flying the Hong Kong flag.
