NEW YORK, April 21. /TASS/. The orchestrators of the acts of sabotage on the Nord Stream gas pipelines last September in the Baltic Sea may have had access to a high-speed submersible vehicle, in which they may have absconded from the scene of the crime, the Bloomberg news agency said on Thursday, citing a Danish naval diver.
In his version of events, the attackers may have used equipment typically found in the arsenal of contemporary naval forces. "A surface vessel remaining relatively static for hours as it waited for a dive team [to complete the job], he says, would’ve attracted unwanted attention [while at anchor] or been flagged by investigators after the fact," Bloomberg said, citing the diving specialist. It would have taken several hours for an individual diver to install an explosive device and then safely ascend to the surface. Searching for the pipelines’ location without detection devices and precise coordinates, not to mention delivering and then properly placing the explosives, would have been a highly challenging task for the saboteurs, the diver noted.
"The Danish navy says the [diver’s] hypothesis is sound, as it would’ve been difficult for divers to spend the time required to set up an attack at such a depth without being detected," the news agency noted. "The Copenhagen police overseeing the criminal investigation, Denmark’s domestic intelligence agency and its defense and foreign affairs ministries had no further comments," Bloomberg stated.
Official public interactions among the countries affected by the incident have been minimal, as Germany, Denmark, Poland, Sweden and Russia have all initiated their own independent investigations, the news agency noted.