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US Navy plane flew in Nord Stream 2 pipeline leak zone on the night of incident

It came as close as 24 kilometers to the site of the incident, circled once and flew towards the Russian Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad

WASHINGTON, October 8. /TASS/. A US Navy reconnaissance plane flew near the site of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline incident in the Baltic Sea a few hours after first damage was detected, Reuters reported.

According to the report, the P-8A Poseidon aircraft was spotted above the North Sea at 00:03 GMT, when Swedish seismologists registered an underwater blast southeast of Bornholm Island in the Baltic Sea. An hour later, the plane flew to the south of Bornholm, heading to northwestern Poland. The jet spent about an hour in that area before heading to the leakage site at around 02:44 GMT.

It came as close as 24 kilometers to the site of the incident, circled once and flew towards the Russian Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad. The agency said it had no information about the plane’s whereabouts between 03:39 and 06:20 GMT, but at around 07:00 it was about 4 km north of the incident site.

The US Navy told the agency that the plane shown in the tracking data was indeed a US aircraft, but its flight was "unrelated to the leaks from the Nord Stream pipelines."

A US Navy spokesperson also said: "We do not have any additional information to provide at this time."

Four leaks were discovered last week on the Nord Stream gas link, with the most recent one pinpointed by Sweden’s coast guard. Earlier, the Nord Stream AG company reported that three threads of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 offshore gas pipelines had suffered unprecedented damage on September 26. Kremlin Spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated that Moscow was "deeply concerned about the news" and did not rule out that the pipelines’ operation could have been disrupted by an act of sabotage. Swedish seismologists later revealed that two explosions had been recorded along the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26. The Danish Energy Agency reported that a large amount of gas had spilled into the sea.

On Wednesday, Der Spiegel wrote that Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office said that the Nord Stream incident was a "targeted sabotage" which could have been carried out with the involvement of "state players". According to the news source, German investigators admitted that they did not yet know "who is behind the sabotage of the pipelines".

The Russian Prosecutor General’s Office said it had launch a criminal case into a suspected act of international terrorism in connections with the damaged pipelines.

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