The tanker that is suspected of severing multiple subsea cables in the Gulf of Finland dragged its anchor along the bottom for up to 50 nautical miles, according to the results of a sonar survey carried out by Finnish authorities. The chain was still in the water and the anchor was missing when officials boarded the vessel for an inspection.
"The trail ends where the ship lifted the anchor chain. There are several dozen kilometers [of trail] east of that point, if not almost a hundred kilometers," Finnish National Criminal Police inspector Sami Paila told local outlet Yle. "It is . . . part of the evidence being collected in this case, and a very significant one."
The tanker - a known "dark fleet" LR1 recently renamed Eagle S - is now under investigation for three criminal offenses: aggravated vandalism, as previously announced, along with aggravated regulatory offense and aggravated interference with telecommunications. The vessel has been relocated to a sheltered anchorage near Porvoo for further examination.
For now, at-sea investigations have been broken off because of high winds and rough surface conditions, but Finnish authorities plan to resume work as soon as weather allows. In the meantime, the police are interrogating the crew.
Indications of espionage
A maritime commercial services professional told Lloyd's List that the Eagle S had been carrying sophisticated signals intelligence equipment on at least one prior voyage, and that the crew had been threatened into silence about its purpose. The portable gear was brought on board as recently as seven months ago, and was fully removed at the end of the voyage, the source said. The anonymous source also claimed that an unidentified non-crewmember was seen aboard the tanker as well.
Finnish police dismissed the report as a "rumor" in comments to Yle, and said that no such equipment had been found Eagle S at the time of her arrest.
Russian intelligence services operate a well-known covert signals intelligence program in the Russian fishing fleet, particularly off Northern Europe and Scandinavia. During the Cold War, these vessels were common enough that the U.S. Navy gave the class a standard designation, the "Auxiliary, General Intelligence (AGI)" trawler. Today, Western defense analysts are concerned that Russia might make use of its extensive "dark fleet" of lightly-regulated tankers to perform a similar function, allowing them to hide nefarious activity in the crowd of everyday merchant traffic. By some estimates, the Russia-linked dark fleet now amounts to more than 15 percent of the world's tanker fleet.
