BERLIN, February 6. /TASS/. The Swedish prosecutor’s office plans to close its investigation into the act of sabotage at the Nord Stream gas pipelines as it has failed to identify any suspects, the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper said.
The Swedish prosecutor’s office said earlier that it planned to announce its findings on the blasts at the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines on Wednesday.
Sweden ending its probe will not impact the investigation in Germany, which, according to the German authorities, will continue, the newspaper said.
According to the newspaper, after closing the case in Sweden, Stockholm may hand over the evidence it has collected to Berlin. The German side is especially interested in having fragments of the pipes the Swedish military retrieved from the Baltic Sea shortly after the blasts in the fall of 2022 to compare traces of explosives on them with the ones that were found by German investigators onboard the Andromeda yacht.
Germany and Sweden exchanged information during the investigation. Thus, the Swedish prosecutor visited the Office of the Federal Prosecutor in Karlsruhe while not long ago German investigators visited Stockholm to speak with their Swedish counterparts
Unlike Sweden, Poland, according to the newspaper, has been dodging cooperation with German investigators for quite a long time and has agreed to share only a tiny piece of information with them, despite numerous inquiries.
Nord Stream blasts
On September 27, 2022, Nord Stream AG reported "unprecedented damage" on three strings of the offshore gas pipelines of the Nord Stream system. Later, Swedish seismologists said they had identified two explosions on the route of the Nord Stream pipelines on September 26, 2022. Following the incident, the Russian prosecutor general’s office opened a case on charges of international terrorism. Germany, Denmark, and Sweden launched their own national probes but refused to involve Russia.
On February 8, 2023, US investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh published an article that claimed, 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 exercise in June 2022, and that the Norwegians then activated the bombs three months later.
The New York Times said later, citing US officials, that the act of sabotage at the gas pipelines could have been committed by a "pro-Ukrainian group" acting independently.
Swedish prosecutor Mats Ljungqvist, who is investigating the case, told TASS earlier that the Swedish prosecutor’s office saw no need in cooperating with Russia on this matter. He said that the most important thing for Sweden was to make sure that the country had not been used as a platform for this act of sabotage rather than to identify the perpetrator.