The case of sabotage on the Nord Stream gas pipelines continues. Italy has extradited the main suspect, an alleged former agent of the Ukrainian secret service.
On Wednesday, the Italian Supreme Court extradited to Germany a Ukrainian citizen suspected of sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipeline. The Italian authorities will hand him over to the German police in the coming days and they will probably try him in Hamburg. On Wednesday, his lawyer Nicola Canestrini, who is referred to by the Reuters agency, reported about it, writes TASR.
The suspect, 49-year-old Serhiy Kuznetsov, was arrested in Rimini, Italy, back in August on the basis of a European arrest warrant issued by Germany. He has been in custody in northern Italy since then. He complained about the poor conditions in the prison and went on hunger strike for several days in protest. The German Federal Prosecutor’s Office accused him of causing the explosion and sabotage. According to her, he was part of a group that placed explosives on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines near the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea in September 2022.
Kuznetsov was allegedly the coordinator of the entire event. Both pipelines were pressurized with gas at the time of the attack, but were not carrying gas due to the invasion of Ukraine by Russian forces that began in February 2022. According to the weekly Der Spiegel, Kuznetsov is a former agent of the Ukrainian secret service SBU. The Italian authorities are investigating whether he was also involved in the attacks on the ships of the Russian so-called shadow fleet in the Mediterranean.
German investigators concluded that the attack on the gas pipelines was carried out by a group of Ukrainians consisting of five men and one woman. Members of the group probably chartered a yacht that sailed from the German city of Rostock to carry out the attack. Kuznetsov used fake identity documents.
