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Sweden has slammed China for refusing to allow the Nordic country’s chief investigator to board a Chinese vessel suspected of cutting two cables in the Baltic Sea.
The Yi Peng 3 sailed away from its berth in international waters between Denmark and Sweden on Saturday and appears to be heading for Egypt after Chinese researchers boarded the ship on Thursday.
The Chinese team had allowed representatives from Sweden, Germany, Finland and Denmark on board as observers, but denied access to Henrik Söderman, the Swedish prosecutor, according to authorities in Stockholm.
“It’s something the government inherently takes seriously. It is remarkable that the ship is leaving without the prosecutor being given the opportunity to inspect the vessel and question the crew as part of a Swedish criminal investigation,” Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergaard said in comments provided to the Financial Times.
The Swedish government has pressed Chinese authorities on the bulk carrier from international waters into Swedish territory to allow a full investigation into the cutting of Sweden-Lithuania and Finland-Germany data cables last month.
People close to the investigation said boarding the ship on Thursday showed there was no doubt he was involved in the incident.
The Yi Peng 3 is owned by Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, a company that owns only one other vessel and is based near the eastern Chinese port of Ningbo. A spokesman for Ningbo Yipeng told the FT in November that “the government has asked the company to cooperate with the investigation”, but did not respond to further questions.
There is division among countries over the motivation behind the cord-cutting. Some people close to the investigation said they believed it was poor seamanship that may have led to the Yi Peng 3’s anchor dragging along the bottom in the Baltic Sea.
But other governments have said privately that they suspect Russia was behind the damage and may have paid money to the ship’s crew.
The cutting of the two cables was the second time in 13 months that a Chinese ship damaged infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.
The Newnew Polar Bear, a Chinese container ship, damaged a natural gas pipeline in October 2023, dragging its anchor along the bottom of the Baltic Sea for a considerable distance during a storm. Officials reacted slowly to this incident, allowing the vessel to leave the area without stopping, something they wanted to prevent in the case of the Yi Peng 3.
Nordic and Baltic officials are skeptical about the possibility of the same thing happening twice in a row. “The Chinese must be really terrible captains if this keeps happening innocently,” said one Baltic minister.
