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Finnish police detain oil tanker on suspicion of damaging communication cables

It is also reported that the Eagle S "noticeably slowed down" presumably at the moment when the cable between Finland and Estonia was damaged

LONDON, December 26. /TASS/. Finnish police and border guards have detained a Cook Islands-flagged oil tanker on suspicion of involvement in damaging the Estlink 2 undersea cable and two other cables between Estonia and Finland, Reuters reported.

According to the news agency, Finnish law enforcement officers last night boarded an Eagle S vessel last night. According to the police, there is a suspicion that the tanker was involved in the damage to the undersea cables in the Baltic Sea last Wednesday. Against this background, the Border Guard "took control of the ship" to bring it into Finnish territorial waters as part of the ongoing investigation.

In turn, the Yle TV channel reported, citing data from the MarineTraffic vessel tracking service, the Eagle S "noticeably slowed down" presumably at the moment when the cable between Finland and Estonia was damaged. Yle said the tanker belonged to the UAE-based company Caravella and was "the only vessel in the company's fleet." A Finnish border patrol vessel escorted the tanker to waters near the Porkkalanniemi peninsula in the Gulf of Finlan, the TV channel said.

According to one of the Finnish police versions, the EstLink 2 cable was damaged by the anchor of the detained oil tanker. A manager of Finland’s Fingrid power grid company told Yle that it could take up to seven months to repair the cable. According to him, "terrorism and vandalism" cannot be ruled out as possible causes. He noted that there were two ships near the cable when it was cut.

Estonian Foreign Minister Margus Tsahkna, in turn, said that he had discussed the incident with his Finnish counterpart Elina Valtonen. According to him, Tallinn and Helsinki are "in close cooperation" in investigating the causes of the cable damage. Tsahkna said that "deliberate damage to the cable" cannot be ruled out, as there have been "too many incidents" in the Baltic Sea recently.

On December 25, the EstLink 2 energy cable, which runs along the bottom of the Gulf of Finland between Finland and Estonia experienced a sudden outage, and the causes of the incident are being investigated. Later, the Postimees newspaper reported that Estonian companies had reported damage to three cables between the two countries. On November 17 and 18, two cables in the Baltic Sea were damaged. One connects Germany with Finland, the other Sweden with Lithuania.

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