By Nerijus Adomaitis and Essi Lehto
OSLO, Jan 5 (Reuters) – Latvian police have found no evidence linking a ship docked in the port of Liepaja to damage to an underwater telecoms cable running in the Baltic Sea from Latvia to Lithuania, but are investigating the incident further, authorities said on Monday.
The Baltic Sea region is on high alert after a string of power cable, telecom link and gas pipeline outages since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and the NATO military alliance has boosted its presence with frigates, aircraft and naval drones.
The latest outage, of a cable belonging to Swedish fibre optics group Arelion, occurred on Friday near Liepaja. Investigators said on Sunday they had boarded a ship and initiated criminal proceedings, but did not name the vessel.
INSPECTED SHIP AND ANCHOR
The incident came four days after Finnish police seized a vessel en route from Russia to Israel on suspicion of sabotaging an Elisa telecoms cable running across the Gulf of Finland to Estonia by dragging its anchor.
Arelion, owner of the Latvia-Lithuania fibre link, said on Monday one of its cables linking Finland and Estonia was also damaged on December 31, confirming earlier reports, and that a cable from Estonia to Sweden stopped working on December 30.
“All three cables are fully severed,” an Arelion spokesperson said in an emailed statement, adding that each case was under investigation.
“We expect the first cable to be restored within a few days, and the remaining cables within the next one to two weeks.”
MarineTraffic vessel tracking data show four ships crossing the Lithuania-Latvia cable on their way to Liepaja port on January 2, when the latest incident occurred. Three of those ships remained in the port on Monday.
Latvian police said on Monday they had inspected a ship at Liepaja, including its anchor, as well as technical equipment and logs, and that the crew had voluntarily cooperated.
“At present, the information obtained in the criminal case does not indicate a connection of the specific ship with the damage to the optical cable,” a national police statement said.
(Reporting by Nerijus Adomaitis in Oslo, Essi Lehto in Helsinki and Anna Ringstrom in Stockholm; editing by Terje Solsvik and Mark Heinrich)
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