VIENNA, February 7. /TASS/. Sweden's decision to stop its investigation into the Nord Stream explosions implicitly testifies to Russia's non-involvement in organizing the sabotage, Secretary General of the opposition Freedom Party of Austria (FPO) Christian Hafenecker has said.

"If Sweden is now refusing to participate in these investigations, this can probably be seen as a sign that the bombing plotters are not from Russia. Why would [Russian President Vladimir] Putin want to destroy infrastructure from which he benefits?" the politician said in a press release.

The Swedish prosecutor's office announced earlier that it had stopped investigating the sabotage because "Swedish jurisdiction does not apply [to this case]." The office handed over its case files to Germany.

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.

On February 8, 2023, Pulitzer Prize-winning US investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in an article, citing a source, that US Navy divers, with the assistance of Norwegian specialists, had planted explosive devices under the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines in June 2022. The New York Times reported, citing US officials, that a certain "pro-Ukrainian" group might have committed the act of sabotage on the gas pipelines.