By Johan Ahlander and Stine Jacobsen
STOCKHOLM (Reuters) -The cargo ship Vezhen did damage a subsea cable linking Sweden and Latvia last month but it was an accident, not sabotage, a Swedish prosecutor said on Monday, adding that the Maltese-flagged vessel had been released.
The incident took place on Jan. 26 and was one of several in recent months, triggered a hunt for vessels suspected of involvement.
The prosecutor said the Vezhen’s anchor severed the cable but that the incident was related to a combination of bad weather, equipment deficiencies and poor seamanship.
“We can see that the anchor was dropped without involvement by the crew,” Senior Prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist told Reuters.
He said two of the three locking mechanisms preventing the anchor from dropping had been out of commission for a lengthy period. The third was a manual lock.
“We have film footage where we can see a wave hitting the lock and the anchor drops,” Ljungqvist said. “In this case we can say ‘No, it wasn’t a hybrid attack’.”
Ljungqvist said the ship dragged its anchor for more than 24 hours.
“We can see that the speed drops. The anchor pulls the ship in one direction, but the autopilot compensated for it,” he said, adding that the crew had failed to notice this.
Swedish police seized and boarded the Vezhen the day after the cable was damaged in Sweden’s exclusive economic zone.
A second vessel, the Silver Dania, a Norwegian cargo ship with an all-Russian crew, was seized in Norway at the request of Latvian authorities but was cleared of wrongdoing and released.
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.
In response, NATO last month said it would deploy frigates, aircraft and naval drones to help protect critical infrastructure in the region and that it reserved the right to take action against ships suspected of posing a threat.
(Reporting by Johan Ahlander and Stine Jacobsen; editing by Niklas Pollard, Terje Solsvik and Jason Neely)
