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Sweden has sharply criticised China for refusing to permit the Nordic country’s principal investigator on board a Chinese vessel suspected of severing two cables within the Baltic Sea.
The Yi Peng 3 sailed away from its mooring in international waters between Denmark and Sweden on Saturday, and appears to be heading for 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 didn’t permit access for Henrik Söderman, the Swedish public prosecutor, in response to authorities in Stockholm.
“It’s something the federal government inherently takes seriously. It’s remarkable that the ship leaves without the prosecutor being given the chance to examine the vessel and query the crew inside the framework of a Swedish criminal investigation,” foreign minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said in comments provided to the Financial Times.
The Swedish government had put pressure on Chinese authorities for the majority carrier to maneuver from international waters into Swedish territory to permit a full investigation over the severing of Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German data cables last month.
People near the probe said the boarding of the vessel on Thursday had shown there was little doubt it was involved within the incident.
“China’s unwillingness to co-operate on the undersea incident investigations within the Baltic Sea can’t be allowed to set a precedent in Europe — or anywhere else,” said Lithuania’s foreign minister Kęstutis Budrys.
China’s foreign ministry didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment on Sunday.
Yi Peng 3 belongs to Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, an organization that owns just one other vessel and is predicated near the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo. A representative of Ningbo Yipeng told the FT in November that “the federal government has asked the corporate to co-operate with the investigation”, but didn’t answer further questions.
There may be a split amongst countries over the motivation behind the cutting of the cables. Some people near the investigation said they believed it was bad seamanship that will have led to the Yi Peng 3’s anchor dragging along the seabed within the Baltic Sea.
Nevertheless, other governments have said privately that they think Russia was behind the damage and could have paid money to the ship’s crew.
The severing of the 2 cables was the second time in 13 months that a Chinese ship has damaged infrastructure within the Baltic Sea.
The Newnew Polar Bear, a Chinese container ship, damaged a gas pipeline in October 2023 by dragging its anchor along the underside of the Baltic Sea for a substantial distance during a storm. Officials reacted slowly to that incident, allowing the vessel to depart the region without stopping, something that they were keen to forestall within the case of the Yi Peng 3.
Nordic and Baltic officials are sceptical about the potential of the identical thing occurring twice in quick succession. “The Chinese have to be truly dreadful captains if this keeps on happening innocently,” said one Baltic minister.
Additional reporting by Edward White
