Finnish police stop a tanker on suspicion of a cable break in the Baltic Sea

The Finnish Border Guard Service and police stopped the oil-laden tanker Eagle S under the flag of the Cook Islands, it is suspected of breaking a cable at the bottom of the Baltic Sea. This was announced by Finnish police director Ilkka Koskimäki at a briefing on December 26.

The head of the police, whose words are quoted by the local edition Yle, said that the police have reason to believe that this tanker is involved in the breakage of the EstLink 2 cable and three other communication cables. The investigation proved that EstLink 2 was damaged due to an external impact. At the same time, the Eagle S did not have anchors attached. In addition, the anchor chain on one of them was broken and the anchor itself was not on it.

Koskimäki noted that the investigation began the day before, on the evening of Dec. 25. It is too early to say whether the cable damage was accidental. At the same time, he specified that the criminal case is being investigated under the article on "aggravated vandalism", which implies possible negligence.

The tanker is in Finnish territorial waters, the police boarded it and took it under their control. A no-fly zone has been imposed within a 3 km radius of the ship. It is important that earlier the ship moved only in the areas of Turkey and India, and did not enter the Gulf of Finland.

The day before, on December 25, the EstLink 2 DC cable between Estonia and Finland suffered an emergency disconnection. However, the Estonian operator of electricity and gas supply networks Elering reported that the cause of the incident is unknown, but the reliability of power supply of the Republic is ensured, and reserve capacities are used to compensate for the lack of electricity, reports "Gazeta.Ru".

Later, on December 26, Estonian TV company ERR reported that three more submarine cables between Finland and Estonia were disrupted. Elisa Eesti AS and CITIC Telecom CPC, the companies that own the cables, promptly started working on fixing the problems, and the outages had no noticeable impact on users. Nevertheless, the Estonian government decided to hold an emergency meeting about the incident.