The suspect is said to have been on board the sailboat used to blow up part of the pipeline bringing Russian gas to Western Europe in 2022
Italian police have arrested a Ukrainian man who it is claimed is suspected of involvement in the bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines, German prosecutors reported on Thursday.
The man, referred to only as Sergey K, was detained near Rimini on the basis of a European arrest warrant. German investigators believe he led a unit that blew up sections of the pipelines in September 2022.
The attacks, which ruptured both the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea, were, improbably, initially blamed on Russian operatives. But German prosecutors later traced a rented sailing yacht to the operation and linked it to Ukrainian nationals.
Investigators say Sergey K was part of a group that placed explosives on the pipelines near the island of Bornholm in September 2022. The accused was allegedly one of the coordinators of the operation. He and his accomplices are said to have used a sailing yacht that departed from the German city of Rostock. The vessel had previously been rented from a German company through intermediaries using forged identification documents.
“After being transferred from Italy, the accused will be brought before the investigating judge of the Federal Court of Justice,” according to the statement by the prosecutor’s office.
Germany’s Federal Prosecutor General has reportedly been investigating the blasts for more than two years on suspicion of sabotage and causing explosives to be detonated. The explosions were seen at the time as an attack on critical energy infrastructure and a stark example of the rising economic fallout of the Ukraine conflict.
In 2023, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published a report claiming that then-US President Joe Biden had given the order to destroy Nord Stream. According to an informed source who talked to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, the explosives had been planted by US Navy divers a few months earlier under the cover of a NATO exercise. The White House denied the report at the time, calling it “complete fiction.”
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