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Sweden has sharply criticized China for refusing to allow the Nordic country’s top investigator to board a Chinese ship suspected of cutting two cables in the Baltic Sea.
The Yi Peng 3 left its mooring in international waters between Denmark and Sweden on Saturday and appears to be heading to Egypt after Chinese investigators boarded the ship on Thursday.
The Chinese team had allowed representatives from Sweden, Germany, Finland and Denmark on board as observers, but did not allow access to Henrik Söderman, the Swedish prosecutor, according to authorities in Stockholm.
“It’s something the government inherently takes seriously. “It is notable that the ship sailed without the prosecutor having had the opportunity to inspect it and question the crew as part of a Swedish criminal investigation,” Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said in comments provided to the Financial Times.
The Swedish government had pressured Chinese authorities to move the bulk carrier from international waters to Swedish territory to allow for a full investigation into the breakage of Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German data cables last month.
People close to the investigation said the boarding of the ship on Thursday had shown there was little doubt he was involved in the incident.
Yi Peng 3 belongs to Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, a company that owns only one other vessel and is based near the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo. A representative for Ningbo Yipeng told the Financial Times in November that “the government has asked the company to cooperate with the investigation,” but did not respond to further questions.
There is a division among countries over the motivation behind cutting the cables. Some people close to the investigation said they believed it was poor seamanship that may have caused the Yi Peng 3’s anchor to drag across the seabed in the Baltic Sea.
However, other governments have said privately that they suspect Russia was behind the damage and may have paid money to the ship’s crew.
The breakage 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 gas pipeline in October 2023 by dragging its anchor along the bottom of the Baltic Sea for a considerable distance during a storm. Authorities reacted slowly to that incident, allowing the ship to leave the region without stopping, something they wanted to avoid in the case of the Yi Peng 3.
Nordic and Baltic officials are skeptical that the same thing could happen twice in a row. “The Chinese must be truly terrible captains if this keeps happening innocently,” said one Baltic minister.
