Finland court rejects request for release of tanker in undersea cables probe

HELSINKI: A Finnish court on Friday denied a request for the release of an oil tanker suspected by police of damaging an undersea power line and four telecommunications cables last week.

Finland on December 26 seized the Eagle S tanker carrying Russian oil on suspicion that it damaged the Finnish-Estonian Estlink 2 power line as well as the telecoms cables the previous day by dragging its anchor across the bottom of the Baltic Sea.

A lawyer representing United Arab Emirates-based Caravella LLC FZ, which owns the tanker, had sought the release of the vessel and crew.

Finnish authorities on December 26 seized a ship carrying Russian oil in the Baltic Sea on suspicion it caused the outage of an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia a day earlier, and that it also damaged or broke four internet lines.

The Cook Islands-registered ship, named by authorities as the Eagle S, was boarded by a Finnish coast guard crew which took command and sailed the vessel to Finnish waters, a coast guard official told a press conference.

“From our side we are investigating grave sabotage,” Robin Lardot, Director of the Finnish National Bureau of Investigation, said.

“According to our understanding, an anchor of the vessel that is under investigation has caused the damage,” he added.

The Finnish customs service said it had seized the vessel’s cargo and that the Eagle S was believed to belong to Russia’s so-called shadow fleet of ageing tankers that seek to evade sanctions on the sale of Russian oil.

Two fibre-optic cables owned by Finnish operator Elisa linking Finland and Estonia were broken, while a third link between the two countries owned by China’s Citic was damaged, Finnish transport and communications agency Traficom said.

A fourth internet cable running between Finland and Germany and belonging to Finnish group Cinia was also believed to have been severed, the agency said.

Both the Finnish and the Estonian governments will hold extraordinary meetings later on Thursday to assess the situation, they said in separate statements.

Baltic Sea nations are on high alert for potential acts of sabotage following a string of outages of power cables, telecom links and gas pipelines since 2022, although subsea equipment is also subject to technical malfunction and accidents.

The European Union said it strongly condemned any deliberate destruction of the continent’s infrastructure.

“We commend the Finnish authorities for their swift action in boarding the suspected vessel,” said a joint statement from EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas and the European Commission, the bloc’s executive body.

Repairing the 170-km (106-mile) Estlink 2 interconnector will take months, and the outage raised the risk of a strained power supply during the winter, operator Fingrid said in a statement.

Estonian Prime Minister Kristen Michal said, however, that his country would continue to have sufficient access to electricity.

The Eagle S Panamax oil tanker crossed the Estlink 2 electricity cable at 1026 GMT on Dec 25, a Reuters review of MarineTraffic ship tracking data showed, identical to the time when Fingrid said the power outage had occurred.

The ship was stationary near the Finnish coast on Dec 26 afternoon, with a Finnish patrol vessel stopped nearby, the data showed.