Swedish authorities say they have detected a Chinese ship moving near two telecoms cables that failed within hours of each other on the Baltic Sea bed in recent days.
Prosecutors in Stockholm have launched a preliminary investigation into suspected sabotage, hours after Germany dubbed the cable failure part of a “hybrid operation”.
On Sunday morning at about 10am, Swedish authorities registered problems with a data cable under the Baltic Sea from the Öland island to Lithuania. At 4am on Monday, telecoms operators in Finland and Germany reported problems with another cable called C-Lion-1.
Both cables were damaged in the Swedish economic zone, prompting prosecutors in Stockholm to take the investigation lead.
I’m inclined to agree. Both events seem to involve too many coincidences for it to be unintentional. I have no idea how they would prove this, and moreso what the official response would be.
I’d be very curious to see a video or write-up of how the investigation is done and if there is any deep sea forensics work.
Yeah it would be hard to prove it wasn’t just an idiot dragging many thousands of pounds behind them. But at 60-70 meters deep is deeper (but not unheard of) of a depth for a ship to lay anchor.
For them to then start going again while dragging the anchor and not realize the ship is moving incorrectly for a long distance seems impossible.
This particular instance is sounding more malicious as it seems they have the same ship at the right location to have caused the damage on 2 occasions now. I haven’t gotten to read any updates since they were pinning down the ship’s location data yesterday to see if they’ve found even more showing this was intentional.
We have had recentish events though where we have had extreme disruption caused by ships with the Ever Given in the Suez and the Dali collapsing the bridge to the Baltimore ports due to human error. The Baltimore incident has a nice write up on the investigation, going through the ship maintenance, questioning different people, and going through the ships’s black box data.