“Weather conditions and deficiencies in equipment and seamanship” were behind last month’s disruption, prosecutors say.
Swedish investigators have found that bad weather, deficient equipment and poor seamanship were responsible for the latest Baltic Sea cable disruption — not sabotage.
Senior prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist, from Sweden’s National Security Unit, said in a statement Monday that the vessel that broke an undersea fiber optic cable between Latvia and Sweden on Jan. 26 “clearly” did not do so as an act of sabotage.
Latvian public broadcaster LSM reported at the time that the cut was due to “external influence,” citing the affected cable operator and Latvian State Radio and Television Centre.
Swedish authorities started an investigation after the incident to determine whether it was done intentionally. The probe has so far established that the vessel Vezhen caused the break, as suspected, but has found no evidence that the incident was an act of sabotage.
Instead, it was the result of a “combination of weather conditions and deficiencies in equipment and seamanship,” Ljungqvist said.
Officials from the Swedish coast guard, police and military have taken part in the investigation, he added. Authorities had seized the ship, but that decision has now been lifted.
The cut was the latest in a recent spate of incidents involving damage to subsea energy and data cables that has prompted NATO to ramp up its work on detecting and stopping attacks against infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.
Finland in December opened a criminal investigation into the potential involvement of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet in breaking an undersea power cable between Finland and Estonia on Christmas Day.
Henna Virkkunen, the EU’s tech czar, has said the bloc is “ready to do more and better” when it comes to protecting cables.
