Sweden criticises China for refusing full access to vessel suspected of Baltic Sea cable sabotage

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Sweden has harshly criticized China for not allowing the Scandinavian country’s chief inspector to board a Chinese ship suspected of cutting two cables in the Baltic Sea.

Yi Peng 3 left its anchorage in international waters between Denmark and Denmark. Swedish on Saturday and appears to be headed for Egypt after Chinese inspectors boarded the ship on Thursday.

According to officials in Stockholm, the Chinese team allowed representatives from Sweden, Germany, Finland and Denmark on board as observers, but denied entry to Swedish prosecutor Henrik Söderman.

“This is an issue that the government inherently takes seriously. Minister of Foreign Affairs Maria Malmer Stenergard, in her comment to the Financial Times, said: “It is noteworthy that the ship left without giving the prosecutor the opportunity to examine the ship and interrogate the crew within the framework of the criminal investigation in Sweden.”

There was the Swedish government Putting pressure on Chinese officials The bulk carrier moved from international waters to Swedish territory so that a full investigation could be carried out into the cutting of Sweden-Lithuania and Finland-Germany data cables last month.

People close to the investigation said the boarding of the ship on Thursday showed there was little doubt that the ship was involved.

Yi Peng 3 is owned by Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, a company based near the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo, which owns only one other ship. A representative for Ningbo Yipeng told the FT in November that “the government has asked the company to cooperate with the investigation” but did not answer further questions.

There is disagreement among countries about the motivation behind cutting cables. Some people close to the investigation said they believed it was poor seamanship that caused the Yi Peng 3’s anchor to drift along the seabed in the Baltic Sea.

But other governments have said privately that they suspected Russia was behind the damage and may have paid off the ship’s crew.

The severing of the two cables was the second time in 13 months that a Chinese ship damaged infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.

New Polar BearA Chinese container ship damaged a gas pipeline by dragging its anchor a considerable distance along the bottom of the Baltic Sea during a storm in October 2023. Authorities reacted slowly to this incident, allowing the ship to leave the area without stopping; In the case of Yi Peng 3, they wanted to prevent this.

Scandinavian and Baltic officials are skeptical about the possibility of the same thing happening twice in a row. “If this continues innocently, the Chinese must be really terrible captains,” said one Baltic minister.