NEW YORK, February 7. /TASS/. Denmark and Sweden knew what was happening to the Nord Stream natural gas pipelines and who was behind the scheme and therefore they could have chosen to dump their probes into the sabotage, US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh said.

Earlier, the German newspaper Suddeutsche Zeitung reported that the Swedish prosecutor’s office plans to close its investigation into detonations on the Nord Stream gas pipelines as it has failed to identify any suspects. Swedish prosecutors plan to announce their findings on the blasts of the Nord Stream and Nord Stream 2 pipelines later on Wednesday.

"The failure of the two nations to complete their inquiry may have stemmed from the fact, as I was told, that some senior officials in both countries understood precisely what was going on," Hersh, who is Pulitzer Prize winner, wrote in his blog on Substack.

According to Hersh, both Stockholm and Copenhagen knew that "the US was practicing underwater diving in the Baltic Sea for months before the explosions." In addition, he continued, "there is no evidence that [US] President [Joe] Biden, in the sixteen months since the pipelines were destroyed, has `tasked’ <…> his experts to conduct an all-source investigation into the explosions." Nor has German Chancellor Olaf Scholz made "any significant push to determine who did what," he concluded.

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, 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.