The Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) continues to investigate intensively the attack on the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. According to information from WELT AM SONNTAG, the Federal Public Prosecutor is now having a double-digit number of investigators from the BKA’s state security investigating the act of sabotage. This newspaper also learned from security circles that the exchange of information between German and foreign investigators has recently been intensified.
Originally Denmark, Sweden and Germany wanted to investigate the destruction of the pipelines together in a “Joint Investigation Team” – this did not happen because first Sweden and later Denmark had left the group. The reason at the time was concerns about secrecy.
“Cooperation with these countries is now much better,” says investigators. The most important clue is a chartered sailing yacht named “Andromeda”. She set sail from Rostock in September 2022 and drove via Wiek on Rügen to the island of Christinsø near Bornholm. The ship was leased under false personal details from a company in Poland said to be owned by Ukrainians.
BKA investigators searched the sailing boat in January. In the cabin, they found explosives equivalent to those found on the wreckage of the pipelines. However, it is possible that this is a deliberately wrong track. Furthermore, the traces and objects secured in and on the ship are evaluated by the BKA’s Forensic Institute. In addition to state security, the Federal Police, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Intelligence Service are also dealing with the attack.
Meanwhile, unrest is spreading in the Bundestag. The CDU interior expert Christoph de Vries told WELT AM SONNTAG that there was “considerable dissatisfaction with the federal government’s information policy towards parliament and the public in relation to the sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines” across the parliamentary groups in the interior committee. Every “attentive newspaper reader” knows more than the members of parliament. Not commenting on press coverage could fuel “speculations as to authorship, which are in Russia’s interests.”
