News

A day after the Russian navy intercepted the Maltese-flagged freighter Arctic Sea about 300 miles off Cape Verde, Defence Minister Anatoly Serdyukov said hijackers had seized control of the ship in Swedish waters on July 24 and forced its Russian crew at gunpoint to sail toward Africa.

The Washington Post writes, the statement was the first official confirmation that the ship had been hijacked. But Russian authorities said nothing about why anyone would seize an aging vessel carrying timber and declined to address glaring inconsistencies in accounts of the incident.

No ship has been hijacked in the Baltic Sea in several centuries, according to Swedish officials, and some security and maritime analysts said the sophistication of the operation pointed to state involvement and secret cargo, possibly nuclear material.

Finnish officials have confirmed that firefighters took the unusual step of conducting radiation tests on the Arctic Sea before it left Pietarsaari, in western Finland, in late July. The results were negative.

Linda Widmark, press secretary for the Swedish National Police Board said there was no sign of trouble when the freighter communicated with British authorities as it passed through the Dover Strait on July 28.

Everything seemed fine July 31, too, when Swedish police spoke by phone with a man identifying himself as the captain, Widmark said.

But then the authorities lost contact with the freighter, prompting a two-week international search.

Mikhail Voitenko, a maritime security consultant and journalist who has been helping relatives of the crew members, said that the official version was full of holes and that the crime was beyond the means of ordinary pirates. Only "commandos" could pull off a hijacking in one of the world's busiest shipping lanes, within cellphone range, he argued, adding, "The operation cost more than the cargo and ship combined."