HELSINKI (Reuters) – The owner of an oil tanker seized by Finland last week on suspicion of sabotaging undersea power lines and four telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea is seeking to Release the ship.
Finnish police and coast guard officials boarded the Cook Islands-registered Eagle S on Thursday and took it to a location near a Finnish port where the crew was being questioned.
The Baltic states have been on high alert since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 amid a series of disruptions to power cables, telecommunications lines and gas pipelines.
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Investigators said they believe the Eagle S severed the Estlink 2 submarine cable connecting Finland and Estonia on December 25 and severed or damaged four fiber optic lines by dragging its anchor across tens of kilometers of the ocean floor.
Finland’s president said last week he believed further damage to the seabed would occur if the ship was not stopped.
Finnish Customs said it believed the Eagle S was part of a shadow fleet of aging tankers being used to evade sanctions on Russian oil sales and had formally seized its cargo even though it was still on board.
The owner of the Eagle S, United Arab Emirates-based Caravella LLC FZ, filed a request to lift the arrest of the ship with the Helsinki District Court on Monday.
Finnish lawyer Herman Ljungberg, who filed documents on behalf of the company, said authorities had not provided any explanation of the legal basis for seizing and boarding the ship.
“The Finns hijacked a ship,” Ljungberg told Reuters.
He said investigators questioned the crew without any legal assistance and that they were sleep deprived.
A police spokesman said the ship’s seizure was carried out in accordance with Finnish law and the crew had been informed of their rights, including the right to legal assistance.
The spokesperson added that they were not sleep deprived.
(Reporting by Essi Lehto in Helsinki, Stine Jacobsen in Copenhagen and Andrius Sytas in Vilnius; Writing by Terje Solsvik; Editing by Andrew Heavens)
