Norwegian police said they seized and boarded a Norwegian ship with an all-Russian crew on suspicion of involvement in damaging a telecoms cable linking Sweden and Latvia in the Baltic Sea last Sunday.
The ship, named Silver Dania, was seized at the request of Latvian authorities by Norway's coast guard and police in the northern Norwegian city of Tromsø.
“It is suspected that the ship has been involved in serious damage to a fiber cable in the Baltic Sea between Latvia and Sweden,” the police said in a statement on Friday.
Sweden and Latvia opened an investigation on Sunday into suspected sabotage of a cable linking the two countries, and Swedish police later seized and boarded a Maltese-flagged ship suspected of causing the damage.
A Norwegian police spokesperson said the two ship seizures were related to the same incident.
The Baltic Sea region is on high alert after a string of power cable, telecom link and gas pipeline outages since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and NATO recently boosted its presence with frigates, aircraft and naval drones.
The Silver Dania is Norwegian-owned and flagged and has been sailing from Saint Petersburg in the Baltic Sea to Murmansk in the Russian Arctic, police said.
The owner and crew of the Silver Dania had voluntarily agreed that it would follow a coast guard vessel to port, the police added.
Swedish police and a prosecutor handling the case in Sweden did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
