OSLO (Reuters) – Norwegian police said on Friday they had seized and boarded a Norwegian ship with an all-Russian crew on suspicion of involvement in causing damage to a telecoms cable in the Baltic Sea.
The ship, named as Silver Dania, was seized at the request of Latvian authorities, and with the help of Norway’s coast guard, police in the northern Norwegian city of Tromsoe said.
“It is suspected that the ship has been involved in serious damage to a fibre cable in the Baltic Sea between Latvia and Sweden,” the police said in a statement.
Sweden and Latvia opened an investigation on Sunday into suspected sabotage of a cable linking the two countries, and Swedish police later seized and boarded a Maltese-flagged ship suspected of causing the damage.
A Norwegian police spokesperson said the two ship seizures were related to the same incident.
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 recently boosted its presence with frigates, aircraft and naval drones.
The ship that was seized in Norway on Friday was Norwegian owned and flagged, and had been sailing from St. Petersburg in the Baltic Sea to Murmansk in the Russian Arctic, police said.
The owner and crew of the Silver Dania had voluntarily agreed that it would follow a coast guard vessel to port, the police added.
Swedish police and a prosecutor handling the case in Sweden did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
(Reporting by Terje Solsvik in Oslo and Johan Ahlander in Stockholm; Editing by Stine Jacobsen and Emelia Sithole-Matarise)
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