2 hours ago
2
Finnish police have seized a vessel suspected of damaging a telecommunications cable that runs between Helsinki and Tallinn in the Gulf of Finland.
Police did not disclose any details about the identity of the vessel, but the Finnish public broadcaster Yle, citing the MarineTraffic website, said the ship was the Fitburg, a 132-metre-long cargo ship bearing the flag of St Vincent and the Grenadines, en route from St Petersburg in Russia to Haifa in Israel.
The damage was to an undersea cable owned by the Finnish telecoms group Elisa and occurred in Estonia’s exclusive economic zone, Finnish police said. The Gulf of Finland is bordered by Estonia, Finland and Russia, and is part of the Baltic Sea.
The cable’s owner said in a statement the damage had “not affected the functionality of Elisa’s services in any way”, noting its services had been rerouted. Elisa had detected a fault in its cable early on Wednesday and reported it to Finnish authorities.
The vessel suspected of carrying out the damage was in Finland’s exclusive economic zone when it was located by a Finnish border guard patrol boat and helicopter, and its anchor chain was found to be lowered into the sea, police said. The border guard ship instructed the vessel to stop and raise anchor, and ordered it to move and anchor in Finnish territorial waters.
Finnish police said they were investigating the incident as “aggravated criminal damage, attempted aggravated criminal damage, and aggravated interference with telecommunications”.
The deputy prosecutor general, Jukka Rappe, told Yle he had ordered a preliminary investigation into the case, to be carried out by Finland’s National Bureau of Investigation. “The cargo ship is suspected of having cut the data cable in circumstances where it now seems obvious that there is also a possibility of a crime,” he said. He did not, however, exclude the possibility of an accident.
Police said they were cooperating with several national and international authorities, including those in Estonia.
Energy and communications infrastructure, including underwater cables and pipelines, have been damaged in the Baltic Sea in recent years. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, many experts and political leaders have viewed the suspected cable sabotage as part of a “hybrid war” carried out by Russia against western countries.
“Finland is prepared for security challenges of various kinds, and we respond to them as necessary,” the Finnish president, Alexander Stubb, said in a statement posted to X on Wednesday.
On Christmas Day last year, 2024, the Cook Islands-registered oil tanker Eagle S damaged five cables in the Gulf of Finland after dragging its anchor on the seabed for about 90km (56 miles).
In October, Helsinki’s district court ruled it did not have jurisdiction to hear a case against the ship’s three senior officers. It said it was up to the vessel’s flag state or the defendants’ home countries – Georgia and India – to try them.
Finnish prosecutors have appealed against the ruling.
