A several tens of kilometers long trail on the seabed is one of the pieces of evidence against the crew aboard the tanker Eagle S after the Estlink 2 electric cable was subjected to a suspected sabotage on Christmas Day. This is according to a statement by the Finnish police on their website.

At 12:26 on Christmas Day, Finnish time, a break occurs in the Estlink 2, one of the two direct current cables across the Gulf of Finland between Finland and Estonia.

Suspicions arise that the cable has been sabotaged. Approximately at the same time the cable stops functioning, the oil tanker Eagle S passes over the cable, and according to radar data, the vessel appears to slow down significantly right over it.

That same morning, Eagle S had left the port city of Ust-Luga in Russia.

Boarded by special police

The Finnish Coast Guard meets Eagle S at sea and escorts it to Finnish territorial waters the same evening. Once across the border, armed Finnish special police board the vessel with the help of two helicopters and take control of it.

The police order the crew to hoist the ship’s anchor, but only the anchor chain comes up to the surface. The actual anchor is missing.

The Finnish suspicion is that the crew aboard Eagle S dragged the anchor along the seabed through the Gulf of Finland, thus sabotaging the submarine cable. It is suspected that the anchor has come loose, that this was done intentionally, and that Russia is somehow involved.

“Through submarine investigations, we have so far managed to map the trail on the seabed from start to finish. The trail is several tens of kilometers long. So far, it has not been possible to determine where the anchor may have come loose,” said the general leader of the investigation, Sami Paila from the Central Criminal Police, in a statement on Sunday evening.

This is not the first time Estlink 2 has suffered a breakdown. On January 26, 2024, the direct current cable breaks, and it is not until the beginning of March that the fault is found. The repair work continues until the beginning of September 2024 before the electric cable can be put into operation again. This time, sabotage is not suspected.

Georgians and Indians

Eagle S sails under the flag of the Cook Islands but is owned by a company in India and has an Indian safety certificate. The captain on board is 39-year-old Georgian Davit Vadatchkoria, and the crew of over 20 men consists of Georgians and Indians.

The oil tanker is suspected to be part of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet; a fleet of ships under different flags that transport oil and other Russian export products to the world market in order to complicate their origin tracking and thus bypass Western sanctions.

Eagle S, a Chinese-built ship launched in 2006, has been involved in incidents before. In 2012, it collides with an oil drilling platform off the coast of Texas, and in 2014, it is involved in an oil spill off the coast of Chile.

On Saturday, with the help of pilots and tugs, Eagle S is moved to an anchorage near the island of Emsalö inside the archipelago of Borgå, as the Central Criminal Police in Finland has seized the vessel.

The crew is interrogated by the police, and technical investigations are carried out on the vessel. At the same time, bad weather complicates the ongoing investigation. The suspicion is of severe sabotage.