Author Topic: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian  (Read 24197 times)

Offline mooringman

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #45 on: August 19, 2009, 09:15:58 AM »
Another point is,the vessel was in Kaliningrad,i believe in a shipyard,before she sailed to Finnland.And in Kaliningrad is enough russian military and mafia too......
But it must be "a small piece of strange cargo",because in Finnland was the custom on board.......lol

Offline henrycourt

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #46 on: August 19, 2009, 02:48:07 PM »
The Daily Telegraph is reporting today that at least three maritime authorities have known all along the whereabouts of this vessel.  Will Joe Public ever be told the TRUTH about this matter ?? Don't hold your breath!!! jw.

Offline Allan RO

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #47 on: August 20, 2009, 10:30:18 AM »
HI Kelvin

Nice conspiracy theory - sounds plausible - bit of plutonium going to Al Qaeda ??    or Iran..........or Pakistan ??  may be North Korea ??

Basis for a gripping novel, sure as hell she was not highjacked, how would the highjackers have escaped when they received their booty  -  swim for it with their bags of loot ??

Allan

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #48 on: August 22, 2009, 05:52:26 PM »
Interesting synopsis of things to date from the BBC News Site @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8214426.stm

 Arctic Sea mystery deepens after arrests

By Alan Quartly
Editor, BBC Moscow bureau

Against the early morning Atlantic sun, a bus pulls up on the tarmac at the airport of Cape Verde.

A group of weather-beaten, unshaven men are led in handcuffs through a line of camouflaged soldiers up the rear ramp of a large transport plane.

It is the beginning of a long and arduous journey for the eight alleged hijackers of the freighter Arctic Sea.

Russian state television showed this scene on its main evening news on Thursday evening in a report that looked like a scene from an action film.

The report gave us a closer glimpse of the men who had allegedly been in command of the ship that had been missing for nearly a month.

But, if anything, what we saw and heard only added to the mystery.

With characteristic toughness, the Russian military made the alleged hijackers lie face down on the floor of the plane - apparently for the entirety of the journey to Russia.

They were bare-chested and their hands were cuffed behind their backs. Some of them lay with their heads just millimetres from the boots of their colleagues.

'Private firm'

As ever, Russian television did not shy away from asking questions of people accused of crimes, but not yet convicted.

The report showed one alleged hijacker, apparently called Andrei Lunev, answering questions.

"You called yourselves ecologists, which organisation do you belong to?" he was asked.

"I don't know, some kind of private firm," replied a strained-looking Mr Lunev.

"We wanted to save ourselves from the storm, so we went on board [the Arctic Sea] on the night of 25 July. When we got away from the storm, the captain wouldn't give us any petrol."

The cameraman zoomed in on the colourful tattoos emblazoned on the backs of some of the men.

The implication for Russians is that these men are professional criminals - it is traditional for criminals in Russia to adorn their bodies with complex tattoos.

So we saw intricate pictures of skulls and a lion's head.

Identifying the hijackers

Mr Lunev denied that the group had any weapons. Russia's defence ministry says the group threw their weapons overboard when the vessel was finally located and halted by the Russian warship Ladny on 17 August.

Moscow also says the hijackers demanded a ransom, threatening to blow the ship up if it was not paid.

Russian newspapers have sought to verify this. Kommersant quoted Vladimir Dushin, vice-president of Renaissance Insurance, as saying the company was phoned by an English-speaking caller on 3 August, who demanded $1.5m (

Offline itsfoto

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #49 on: August 22, 2009, 06:58:23 PM »
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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #50 on: August 23, 2009, 08:45:14 AM »
This piece courtesy of the Telegraph On Line @ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/piracy/6074439/Pirate-in-Arctic-Sea-mystery-had-been-dead-for-three-years.html

'Pirate' in Arctic Sea mystery had been 'dead' for three years

The story so far has resembled an over-egged John Le Carre plot, featuring everything from pirates and drug smuggling through to rumours of Russian Mafia feuds and secret plutonium shipments.
 
By Kevin O'Flynn in Moscow and Colin Freeman
Published: 8:45AM BST 22 Aug 2009

An alleged hijacker (C) that was involved in the Arctic Sea freighter disapearence is escorted by Russian military forces at the port of Palmeira
Yet after two weeks at the centre of world attention, the mystery of the Arctic Sea cargo ship now looks like being deprived of one key element of a good spy thriller - a satisfactory ending that explains it all.

Details emerged for the first time this weekend of the men accused of carrying out the hijacking, who were held last week after the Russian navy surrounded the ship off the coast of West Africa.

But rather than solving the mystery, the arrests have merely thickened the plot, with the eight suspects who appeared before a Moscow court resembling neither an elite criminal gang, nor the group of harmless "ecologists" whom they claim to be.

One is a metal worker, another is a builder - and a third is believed to be a fisherman whose family feared he had drowned at sea three years ago. The family of Andrei Lunev have told how they got the shock of their lives when they turned on Russian TV to see a man with the same name and vaguely similar appearance identified as a prisoner on a Russian military aircraft.

"I saw him and mother saw him, it is an older person but it matches with Andrei, everything matches, like the fact that he is a fisherman," said Mr Lunev's aunt, Tatyana Altavil, from Kursk province, near Russia's border with Ukraine. "If we knew his date of birth, or his patronymic name, then we could say for sure."

Her nephew, who had left Kursk after getting in trouble for brawling, is currently registered on a missing persons website, which states: "Looking for Andrei Vladimirovich Lunev. Worked in Petropavlvsk-Kamchatka on a fishing ship. Disappeared when the ship turned over 18/08/06."

They were initially told by officials that he had drowned when his boat, the Pelagial, had capsized. But they later learned that he had possibly quit the crew the day before after a quarrel with his boss - and what has happened to him since remains a mystery.

Ms Altavil said that last year Mr Lunev's mother, who is deeply religious, even consulted a monk in a monastery in a bid to find out where he was. "As there was no persuasive explanation that he was listed as dead, she got a prediction from a monk, who said look in Estonia and the Baltic states".

The monk's prediction appears to have been true, although none of his family quite expected him to resurface in such dramatic fashion.

The latest twists to the tale, however, do little to shed any further light on on exactly what went on aboard the ship, which was apparently hijacked after departing from Finland on July 21.

Officials have said the hijackers demanded a $1.5 million ransom and threatened to blow up the freighter if their demands were not met. But Russian and European maritime experts have cast doubt on the ransom reports, and speculation has grown that the freighter was carrying contraband cargo, possibly weapons or drugs. The speed with which the Russian navy apprehended the ship, and the trail of false information that was fed to the media, has fuelled theories that it might have been carrying an illicit cargo for the Kremlin - possibly an embargo-breaking shipment of arms or nuclear fuels to another country. Some believe that it may have been fitted with secret cavities during repairs made in the Russian port of Kaliningrad - a notorious Baltic smuggling enclave.

What now seems increasingly likely, though, is that the truth will never come out. Crew members have told Russian news reporters that they have been told not to disclose "state secrets", while well-informed Russian marine journalists have said they are now wary of commenting further on the case. And the explanations proffered by the alleged pirates have raised more questions than they answer. When quizzed on Russian state TV last week, Mr Lunev said he was working with an ecological group, who approached the Arctic Sea for help when their own inflatable ran out of petrol. But when asked what the group's name was, he answered: "I don't know. It was some private organisation."

Even the suspects' extensive tattoos - normally a reliable guide to identifying different sub-tribes of the Russian Mafia - have caused bafflement. "It is clear they are not our criminals, said Alexander Sidorov, the author of Russian Criminal Tattoos book, after examining TV footage.

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #51 on: September 03, 2009, 06:32:09 AM »
An interesting slant on the story from the Israel Press - courtesy of http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1112038.html

Finland asks Putin to explain nabbed ship incident
By Dan Tamir and Yossi Melman

The Russian cargo ship that disappeared on its way from Finland to Algeria came up in talks between Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen and Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who met yesterday in the Polish city of Gdansk to discuss energy and the environment, according to the Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat.

Finland had officially requested information from Russia on the affair, in which the "Arctic Sea" disappeared for a month on its way to deliver timber to Algeria, the paper said
"We discussed what possible motives there may have been for the hijacking," Vanhanen was quoted as saying.

The "Arctic Sea" set sail from Finland on July 22, flying a Maltese flag, and was manned by a Russian crew, carrying $2 million of timber that belonged to a Finnish company. On July 24, eight interlopers from Russia and neighboring countries boarded the ship; the ship's tracking device was disconnected. On August 12, the Russian Navy began to look for the ship and said it had found the vessel a week later.

But why bother with a ship with such a small cargo? Why was no distress signal sent out? Why did it take the Russian Navy more than two weeks to begin a search? Is there a connection between the apparent piracy and President Shimon Peres' sudden visit to Russia the day after the ship was found?

In an interview with Time Magazine, the former chief of staff of the Estonian Army, Admiral Tarmo Kouts, said he believed the ship was carrying Russian weapons to the Middle East, and that the Israelis intercepted it. Other Russian political commentators put forward the same theory. Pundit Yulya Latynina told Time she believed Israel had intercepted the cargo, which was intended for Syria or Iran. The theory was denied by the Russian ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin.

A spokeswoman for the President's Residence declined to respond to Time's questions about a possible connection between the affair and Peres' meeting with Putin.

Was Israel possibly involved in the kidnapping? Theoretically, possible. The Naval Commado has taken control of ships - the Karin A, which was transporting weapons from Iran to the Palestinian Authority. But it is highly unlikely that a prime minister in Israel would dare order the abduction of a Russian ship, even if it were carrying anti-aircraft missiles to Iran or Syra. And why kidnap a ship whose cargo was dangerous to Israel's security? It would be better in that case to sink it, leaving no trace.

Speculation grew yesterday that the Russians staged the kidnapping to avoid the embarrassment of the revelation that the ship was carrying missiles. This seems reasonable, though impossible to verify. And why stage a kidnapping in a busy shipping lane in the Baltic Sea and then leave the ship sailing for two weeks?

When asked directly about the affair, Defense Minister Ehud Barak declined to comment.

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #52 on: September 03, 2009, 12:10:16 PM »
This story is running on the BBC News web site @ http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8235647.stm

 Russia ship mystery editor flees

A journalist has fled Russia after suggesting the Arctic Sea cargo ship that was apparently hijacked in July may have been carrying illegal weapons.

Mikhail Voitenko said he had been told to leave Moscow or face arrest.

The editor of Sovfracht, an online maritime journal, fled on Wednesday, saying he may not be able to return as his life would be in danger.

Eight men, mainly from Estonia, have been charged with hijacking and piracy over the case.

The men are suspected of seizing the ship and its 15-man Russian crew after raiding it disguised as police.

The alleged hijackers were taken to Russia after the ship was spotted 300 miles (480km) off the west coast of Africa on 16 August.

Secret shipment

Mr Voitenko - who was among the first to cast doubt on official explanations about the ship's disappearance - told the BBC it was nonsense to suggest pirates had been involved.

Instead he suggested the ship may have been carrying a secret shipment of weapons as part of a private business deal by state officials.

Speaking to the BBC from Turkey, Mr Voitenko said he had received a threatening phone call from "serious people" whom he suggested may have been members of Russia's intelligence agency, the FSB.

The caller told Mr Voitenko that those involved in the mysterious case of the Arctic Sea were very angry with him because he had spoken publicly, and were planning on taking action against him, he said.

"As long as I am out of Russia I feel safe," Mr Voitenko told the BBC. "At least they won't be able to get me back to Russia and convict [me]."

He also said Nato knew exactly what had happened to the Arctic Sea.

A Nato spokesman said the alliance had been in contact with Russia throughout the crisis, but would not say anything more.

The FSB refused to comment on the allegations.

Further inspection

Mystery continues to surround the ship's disappearance, amid speculation the ship may have been intercepted by Mossad - Israel's foreign intelligence service - in order to prevent a shipment of illegal arms to the Middle East.

The 4,000-tonne Maltese-flagged vessel vanished in July days after leaving Finland with an apparent cargo of timber worth $1.8m (

Offline Jim Davenport

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #53 on: September 06, 2009, 01:18:14 PM »

Did any other AIS sites show a break in the 'Arctic Sea' transponder trace like this one; just South of the Isle of Wight morning of 29/7/2009.Notice the course alteration of 15 degrees Port at 0217 BST...

Offline Jim Davenport

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #54 on: September 08, 2009, 12:58:03 PM »
'Deck cargo stowage' and 'Spot the 'crew' member quizzes:

Here goes:Large it up;Look carefully..just say what you see!! Have fun...

http://www.fotoflite.com/general-cargo-ship/346486-arctic-sea.html

Offline Harry

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Offline James

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Re: Arctic Sea found in San Sebastian
« Reply #56 on: September 17, 2009, 06:55:37 AM »
But, perhaps, it is worth departing from emotions and taking a view of the facts. They explain the essence of the matter more expressive than something other.

Firstly, the practical international standards provide for obligatory observance of navigation rules. A vessel may not put out to sea if it is technically defective. And if this is the case, then all the life-support systems of the Arctic Sea were in working condition. The ship just could not have put to sea, if communication, navigation, electrical equipment and other systems were not functioning.

That is why the "radiosilence mode" of the Arctic Sea could begin only in consequence of "external" factors influence. And these factors are more probably of a criminal nature. Because it is no mere chance that the captain of the ship Sergey Zaretsky could send only one SMS-message, the content of which is yet more proof that the sender’s actions were controlled.

Secondly, any ship putting out to sea undergoes obligatory customs, border and other kinds of control. The party making such actions, in case of detection of smuggled and other nondeclared goods is obliged to immediately notify the parties owning the goods and its carrier. Furthermore, measures provided by international regulatory legal acts should be taken.

However Finland did not notify the Russian party of the Arctic Sea crew’s arrest or smuggled goods on shipboard. That is why there is every reason to believe that the cargo was completely corresponding to the declared consignment notes, and there were no "classified materials" transported by the crew. The version of a "classified goods" falls apart at the seams in this case too.

Thirdly, there is a standard world practice according to which in force-majeure circumstances a ship owner is obliged to immediately notify public authorities in conformity with applicable rules.

But it was not done. This brings up just questions: "Why the ship-owner, whom the Arctic Sea belonged, did not find it necessary to inform the Russian party of the above circumstances? What are motives of his behavior? Whom was he lead by?" There remains a lot of questions, but investigation will give answers to them. However it is evident that in this situation the crew became hostage of its owners or their protectors. Of those, who are trying now to shift the blame for what has happened onto the Russian authorities and crew.

Fourthly, according to working rules of the maritime law, any party, discovered a lost vessel or a vessel in distress, is obliged to render all necessary assistance in these cases and to inform the party owning the transport.

And not all is plain sailing in this question as well. It perplexes that the sailing near the Arctic Sea vessels under the flags of Sweden, France, Great Britain and other states did not wish to interfere in this situation settlement.

NATO combat ships’ "position of inaction" in relation to transportation of "secret and insecure", according to some information agencies, materials also remains unclear. Otherwise, how can be considered the fact that a ship, allegedly transporting "dangerous materials", "weapon" and other "secret materials", was sailing to a point of its destination without hindrance.

And references to possible lack of information about nature of goods of the leading world powers intelligence services, as well as to impossibility to establish the Arctic Sea’s location are at least unfounded and invite a number of questions.

Fifthly, according to the accepted rules, any civil vessel has a name or a certain number. Number is changed in accordance with established procedure, in specially designated areas.

In the case with the Arctic Sea the following happened. During its detention by the Russian ship Ladny, trying to disorient naval mariners, the captain of the dry cargo ship Arctic Sea went on the air and reported on his belongings to the flag of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. At that he called false name of the vessel JON JIN 2 and its sailing route Havana-Sierra Leone, with cargo of palmtrees, as well as his IMO 8018912 number.

During inspection of the ship by naval mariners it was found out that the name JON JIN 2 had been applied with a fresh coat of paint over the name Arctic Sea.

 

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