Russian captain among 2 crew found guilty by Finnish court of damaging Baltic cables

HELSINKI — A Finnish court on Thursday convicted the captain and another crew member of a cargo ship of damaging undersea telecommunications cables in the Baltic Sea late last year.

The Helsinki District Court found the two guilty of aggravated sabotage and gave them prison sentences. The captain was sentenced to three years and six months, and the boatswain to two years and 10 months. National broadcaster Yle reported that the captain is Russian and the boatswain Azerbaijani.

The court also ordered them to pay compensation for the costs of examining and repairing the cables.

The ship, the Fitburg, was flagged in St. Vincent and the Grenadines and was sailing from Russia to Israel when the incident occurred on Dec. 31. It was subsequently seized and inspected. Police said at the time that the ship had been dragging its anchor for hours when it was discovered in Finland’s exclusive economic zone.

The ship dragged its anchor along the seabed for about 80 miles, damaging two telecommunications cables, according to a court statement. The statement said the anchor’s locking mechanism had been working properly and the anchor had been raised when the ship left St. Petersburg the previous day.

The indictment did not allege that the captain had explicitly ordered the anchor to be lowered, but the court found that both defendants must have known it was dragging.

Both defendants denied wrongdoing, Yle reported. The court dismissed a charge of aggravated interference with telecommunications, saying it was covered by the aggravated sabotage charges.

The cable damage was one of a string of incidents in the Baltic Sea involving ships linked to Russia. More broadly, the Associated Press has tracked around 200 incidents of sabotage and malign activity across Europe that Western officials have blamed on Russia since its invasion of Ukraine.