After the navy and the pipeline owner also started surveys this week, Swedish prosecutors announced Friday that they would launch a fresh, complementary crime scene examination of the Nord Stream leaks.
Public prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist issued a statement saying, “I have chosen to perform a number of supplemental inspections of the crime scene along with the Security Service (Sapo).
Ljungqvist stated that the Swedish military forces chose to help with the inquiry as a result of a request, although he did not specify what they were searching for.
At the end of September, four leaks on the two Nord Stream pipelines were discovered in the Baltic Sea, off the Danish island of Bornholm. Seismic research centers said that they had previously detected two underwater explosions.
While the leaks were in international waters, two of them were in the Danish exclusive economic zone and two of them in Sweden’s.
In early October, the Swedish prosecution authority announced that they had collected “pieces of evidence” during an underwater inspection of the leaks in the Swedish economic zone, which had backed up suspicions of sabotage.
The new inspection comes as Sweden’s navy and the owner of the pipeline Nord Stream AG both announced earlier this week that they were conducting their own inspections of the burst pipelines.
Jimmie Adamsson, head of communications for the Swedish navy, confirmed they were at the scene with a ship specialised in diving operations and that they were supporting the prosecution’s new inspection.
But he stressed that it was not linked to the survey they had initiated on their own this week.
“The first investigation has not sparked the second, but they are two separate things,” Adamsson told AFP.
A “specially equipped vessel” has arrived at the site of “the pipeline damage in the exclusive economic zone of Sweden,” according to Nord Stream AG, which is majority controlled by Russia’s Gazprom.
Geopolitical concerns have been centered on the pipelines that link Russia to Germany as Russia curtailed gas supplies to Europe in what is believed to be retaliation for Western sanctions over Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Both of them still held gas that leaked into the water and into the atmosphere even though they weren’t in use when the leaks happened.
AFP