WASHINGTON, February 8. /TASS/. The United States was not involved in the explosions that hit the Nord Stream gas pipelines, Pentagon Spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Garron Garn told TASS on Wednesday.

"The United States was not involved in the Nord Stream explosion," he said.

He referred to a remark by US Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russian, Ukrainian, and Eurasian affairs Laura Cooper who had said at a briefing on October 4, 2022, that "the US was in no way involved" in the incident.

US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote earlier that "last June, the Navy divers, operating under the cover of a widely publicized mid-summer NATO exercise known as BALTOPS 22, planted the remotely triggered explosives that, three months later, destroyed three of the four Nord Stream pipelines, according to a source with direct knowledge of the operational planning." Hersh added that US President Joe "Biden’s decision to sabotage the pipelines came after more than nine months of highly secret back and forth debate inside Washington’s national security community." The White House, however, dismissed Hersh’s version as a complete lie.

The Nord Stream AG company reported on September 27, 2022, that three threads of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 offshore gas pipelines had suffered unprecedented damage. Swedish seismologists recorded two explosions along the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26. The Russian Prosecutor General's Office opened a case into an act of international terrorism over damage to the pipelines.