Finnish police said on Thursday they were investigating whether a foreign ship was involved in damaging an undersea power cable linking Finland and Estonia after a sudden outage on Wednesday.
The Baltic Sea countries are on high alert in anticipation of possible acts of sabotage after a series of outages in power cables, communications lines and gas pipelines since 2022, although undersea equipment is also vulnerable to technical malfunctions and accidents.
Operator Fingrid said the 658-megawatt Estlink 2 power interconnector was still offline after the outage that began at midday local time on Wednesday, leaving only the 358-megawatt Estlink 1 in operation between the two countries.
“The police, in cooperation with the border guards and other authorities, are investigating the chain of events of the incident,” the Finnish police said in a statement.
Police said investigators were investigating the possible role of a foreign ship, without mentioning the name of the ship.
Meanwhile, Swedish police are leading an investigation into the hacking of two communications cables in the Baltic Sea last month, in an incident that German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said he believed was caused by an act of sabotage.
Separately, Finnish police continue to investigate damage last year to the Balticconnector gas pipeline linking Finland and Estonia, as well as several communications cables, and said it was likely caused by a ship dragging its anchor.
In 2022, the Nord Stream gas pipelines extending from Russia to Germany and running along the seabed in the same waters were blown up, in a case that is still under investigation in Germany.
(Reuters – Reporting by Terje Solsvik; Editing by Chris Rees)
