Post by donnie on Sept 10, 2009 14:14:31 GMT -5
The story around the Arctic Sea is nothing but half-truth, inference and wild, wild speculation. And that’s how the Russian press like it.
The basic details will by now be familiar all over the world. The Finnish owned, Maltese-flagged ship left Finland on July 21, bound for Algeria with $1.8 million worth of sawn timber. On July 24 men posing as Swedish police officers boarded the ship from a speed boat, tied up the crew and searched the vessel. Originally it was reported that the “policemen” had left after a 12 hour search of boat, which had continued on its regular run to the Mediterranean. As we now know, that didn’t happen. But that doesn’t mean we know what did.
According to the story told at the time, the last that was heard of the ship was a routine radio contact with British coast guards as it sailed through the Straits of Dover on July 28. Its signal was then picked up west of Brest on July 29, before it disappeared. The next thing we knew was that after the vessel failed to arrive in Algeria on August 4, the Russian navy was suddenly searching the Atlantic Ocean for a modern day Flying Dutchman. On August 17, a Russian patrol vessel found and boarded the missing ship. A ransom demand for $1.5 million was received by the ship’s insurers, but no one could tell if it was genuine.
And that’s about it. Both the crew and the “hijackers” have been flown to Moscow, where the former are “helping police with their enquiries” and the latter have been arrested for kidnapping and piracy. But neither the crew nor their captors have told their story in public, and the investigating authorities have been extremely cautious in their statements. The families of the crew, who have not been allowed to leave Moscow, have complained that they are being treated as suspects rather than victims. Alexander Bastrykin, the head of the Investigative Committee, denied that in an interview with the state-owned Rossiskaya Gazeta daily on Wednesday, but did describe the crew as “victims in need of urgent questioning,” given the mystery surrounding the affair.
Nikolai Makarov, the chief of the Russian General Staff told journalists on Tuesday that “the motivation for the capture is not very clear.” But in the Russian press, at least, the motivation is clear as day: the Arctic Sea was obviously carrying something other than timber; something valuable enough for the small team of desperate men to risk a hijack in some of the world’s busiest and best-policed waters; something the Russian government would deploy the might of its navy to recover. Something like S300 anti-aircraft missiles.
It doesn’t take much imagination to come up with a “stolen nuclear weapons” theory, so the liberal weekly Novaya Gazeta at least deserves some recognition for coming up with this (half) credible back story. The S300 is, indeed, one of the few Russian weapons systems that Western militaries genuinely fear, and the Israelis and Americans have lobbied hard to prevent Russia from supplying the rockets to Iran. Last year even senior Israeli military officials were publicly worrying about it. So far, the Russians have complied - at least overtly. If Novaya Gazeta is to be believed, someone decided the deal should go ahead covertly. The Arctic Sea was loaded with S300s destined for the Islamic Republic via Algeria. Unfortunately for the smugglers, Mossad got wind of the plan and organized the hijacking in the Baltic. And, naturally, both Russian and Israeli officials have denied it.
Meanwhile the tabloid Moskovsky Komsomolets, which has provided some of the most entertaining coverage of the affair, agreed that the Arctic Sea was carrying contraband weapons to an unknown destination, but claimed that the pirates were working for “the special services of a European Union country.” Even so, the motive remained obscure. “It is not a fact that the intercepted shipment was to be used to blackmail Russia in the international arena,” the tabloid noted sagely. “The contracting country may just have been in it for profit - knowing that the owners of the stolen goods would be unlikely to make much noise about it.”
Bastrykin has said that he does “not rule out” the secret cargo theory, but has not suggested that European intelligence agencies are in the habit of lining their own pockets with stolen contraband.
The truth, if it emerges at all, will now emerge from a Moscow court room. The legal process is already underway, and five of the eight suspects -two Latvians, two Estonians and two Russians - have already appealed their arrest for kidnapping and piracy. But there are already questions about the court’s jurisdiction over foreign nationals. And to further muddy the waters, Moskovsky Komsomolets, which claims to have tracked down the pirates’ relatives in Estonia, on Wednesday reported that at least four of the suspects are legally stateless. Expect wilder flights of the imagination as the case unfolds.