BERLIN, March 6. /TASS/. The situation around the investigation into the Nord Stream terror attack sometimes resembles a farce, as to date the probe has failed to come up with any clear-cut findings, Russian Ambassador to Germany Sergey Nechayev told TASS.
"The situation around the terror attack on Nord Streams is reminiscent of a farce at times. Over a year-and-a-half [has passed since the incident and] there haven’t been any clear-cut findings, if one doesn’t count laughable fake news items in the media about Ukrainian yachtsmen-cum-demolition teams," the diplomat noted.
"Our numerous offers to conduct a transparent international investigation are being ignored; there are no responses to our repeated requests for information on the investigation," the diplomat said, noting that "the German government is silent, citing the [exclusive] purview of the Prosecutor General’s Office and the ongoing investigation." "It is difficult to take such explanations seriously," Nechayev added.
As for the decisions by Sweden and Denmark to halt their respective investigations, the envoy pointed out that "this is rather telling and shows these countries’ unwillingness to have anything to do with the final verdict."
On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported unprecedented damage that occurred the day before on three strings of the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 offshore gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. On September 26, 2022, Swedish seismologists registered two explosions on the pipeline routes. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office launched a criminal case in connection with the incident based on charges of international terrorism. Later, US Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article claiming, citing anonymous sources, that US Navy divers had planted explosive devices under the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines under the cover of the BALTOPS naval exercise in June 2022, and that the Norwegians then activated the bombs three months later.
On February 7, the Swedish prosecutor's office announced that it had halted its probe into the act of sabotage at the Nord Stream pipelines. Stockholm said that Sweden’s jurisdiction did not apply in this case while other data had been handed over to Berlin, which is purportedly continuing its own investigation. At the end of February, the Danish police also halted their investigation of the terrorist attack on the pipelines, purportedly due to a lack of grounds for continuing it.