The captain and two officers of an oil tanker accused of severing five undersea power and telecoms cables when their vessel left Russia and sailed through the Gulf of Finland pleaded not guilty as their trial began in Helsinki on Monday.
NATO allies with forces stationed around the Baltic Sea went on high alert after the December 25 incident, one of a string of suspicious cable and gas pipeline outages in the region since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.
Prosecutors say the Eagle S tanker deliberately dragged its anchor along the seabed to sever the Estlink 2 power cable linking Finland and Estonia, as well as four internet cables in the Christmas Day incident.
Finnish security forces intercepted the ship and boarded it from helicopters after ordering it to move into Finnish territorial waters.
The three defendants pleaded not guilty in court, denying all charges and rejecting the cable owners’ claims for damages that amount to tens of millions of euros.
Finnish prosecutors are seeking 2.5 years in prison for the Cook Islands-registered tanker’s Georgian captain, Davit Vadatchkoria, and the Indian first and second officers for aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference with telecommunications.
Vadatchkoria’s lawyer Tommi Heinonen called the incident “a marine accident” in court, and together with the other defendants denied the court’s jurisdiction in the matter, given the cable cuts occurred in international waters.
He told the court that the vessel’s anchor had dropped due to technical faults in the securing of the anchor winch.
On December 25, the Eagle S sailed on for three hours at a reduced speed after severing the first power cable at 12:26 p.m. local time, prosecutors told the court. When contacted and asked by Finnish marine authorities at 3:20 p.m. whether its anchor was up and secured, its crew replied in the affirmative, which was not the truth, prosecutors said.
Defence lawyers said the crew had no reason to believe the anchor had sunk to the seabed as the tanker’s mechanical engineer, who is not on trial, had told the defendants the drop in speed was due to “an engine problem”.
Prosecutors said the tanker continued on its journey and went on to cut four more cables between 6 and 7 p.m. on December 25, which they said showed clear criminal intent.
Finland’s maximum sentence for aggravated criminal mischief is 10 years in prison, while aggravated interference with telecommunications carries a term of up to five years.
Prosecutors say the damage caused serious danger to energy supply and telecommunications in Finland, and that repair costs totalled at least 60 million euros ($70 million).
Last week, a Ukrainian was arrested over the 2022 attacks on the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea. Both Moscow and the West have described the explosions, which largely severed Russian gas supplies to Europe, as sabotage.
Source: Reuters