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Sweden has sharply criticized China for refusing to allow the Nordic country’s chief investigator to board a Chinese ship suspected of cutting two cables in the Baltic Sea.
The Yi Peng 3 sailed from its mooring in international waters between Denmark and Sweden on Saturday, and appears to be bound for Egypt after Chinese investigators boarded the ship on Thursday.
The Chinese team allowed representatives of Sweden, Germany, Finland and Denmark to board the ship as observers, but denied access to Henrik Söderman, Sweden’s public prosecutor, according to authorities in Stockholm.
“It is something the government inherently takes seriously. It is unbelievable that the ship is leaving without the prosecutor having the opportunity to inspect the vessel and question the crew as part of the Swedish criminal investigation,” Foreign Minister Maria Malmer Stenergard said in comments to the Financial Times.
The Swedish government had put pressure on the Chinese authorities to move a bulk carrier from international waters to Swedish territory to allow a full investigation into the cutting of Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German data cables last month.
People close to the investigation said Thursday’s boarding of the ship showed there was no doubt he was involved in the incident.
The Yi Peng 3 belongs to Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, a company that owns only one other vessel and is located near the eastern Chinese port city of Ningbo. A representative for Ningbo Yipeng told the FT in November that “the government has asked the company to cooperate with the investigation”, but did not respond to further questions.
There is division among countries over the motivation behind cord-cutting. Some people close to the investigation said they believed poor seaworthiness caused the Yi Peng 3’s anchor to drag along the seabed in the Baltic Sea.
However, other governments have said privately that they suspect Russia was behind the damage and may have paid off the ship’s crew.
Cutting the two cables was the second time in 13 months that a Chinese ship damaged infrastructure in the Baltic Sea.
The A new polar beara Chinese container ship, damaged a gas pipeline in October 2023 by dragging its anchor along the bottom of the Baltic Sea a considerable distance during a storm. Officials were slow to respond to that incident, allowing the ship to leave the region without stopping, something they wanted to prevent in the Yi Peng 3 case.
Nordic and Baltic officials are skeptical about the possibility of the same thing happening twice in a row. “The Chinese must be really terrible captains if this continues to happen innocently,” said one Baltic minister.
