MaltaMedia.com

The crew at the centre of the hijacked cargo vessel tell of their ordeal for the first time, The Sunday Times of UK reports. The Maltese-registered Arctic Sea, which was officially carrying timber from Finland to Algeria, was hijacked off the coast of Sweden on 24th July. It was recovered off West Africa on August 17 when eight alleged hijackers were arrested.

It had been an uneventful night for the Russian sailor steering the cargo ship Arctic Sea across the Baltic when, at 2.10am, he was confronted by eight masked men. Armed with AK-47 assault rifles and handguns, they forced him into the vessel’s living quarters. They swiftly tied up the rest of the crew in their cabins. Speaking English, the gunmen claimed to be Swedish drugs squad officers acting on a tip-off that the ship was smuggling heroin. Their accents, however, were east European.

The sailors said that they were tied with duct tape and plastic flex, gagged and confiscated of their mobiles.

The intruders had boarded from a rubber dinghy equipped with a global positioning system for navigation and electronics capable of detecting the Arctic Sea’s automatic identification system (AIS), which marked its position.

One crewman locked up with Sergei Zaretski, the captain, had hidden a spare mobile phone. A few hours later, Zaretski sent a cryptic text to Archangel, the crew’s home town, in Russia’s far north. It was received by a local representative of Solchart, the Russian, Finnish-based owner of the Arctic Sea , which was bound for Algeria with a cargo of timber worth £1.2m. “Locked up in the cabins. Don’t know where we are heading or what they’ve found,” the text said. The text puzzled staff. They called back and e-mailed the ship to ask for an explanation thereby alerting the gunmen that the alarm had been raised. Furious, the hijackers threatened the captain at gunpoint, firing another shot that narrowly missed his head and punched a hole in the cabin’s steel wall.

Thus one of the most perplexing maritime mysteries of recent times began. Nine days after the bogus police raid, the Arctic Sea’s AIS was switched off as it sailed towards Portugal. The ship was said to have vanished.

The gunmen demanded a ransom and threatened to execute the crew if security services were alerted. But crewmen’s families and the shipowner appealed to President Dmitry Medvedev, who ordered the navy into action. The guided-missile frigate Ladny was sent to track down the Arctic Sea.

The response fuelled reports that the ship was carrying a secret cargo. Suspicion mounted when sources close to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service, claimed that Israel had tipped off Russia that the vessel was smuggling missiles to Iran.

The ship was finally intercepted near the African islands of Cape Verde, 24 days after being seized. Eight men from Latvia, Estonia and Russia were arrested and flown in a military transport to a Moscow jail.

A flurry of diplomatic activity between Russia and Israel followed.

In an attempt to piece together the puzzle, The Sunday Times of UK said it has spoken at length to six crew members on the understanding that they would remain anonymous: they could face up to seven years in jail if they divulge crucial evidence. In inquiries in seven countries, this newspaper also talked to key figures including the ship’s owner and insurer, relatives and lawyers of the alleged pirates, maritime and military sources and individuals who took part in ransom negotiations.

Until the Ladny caught up with their ship off the African coast on August 16, the gunmen had worn ski-masks and gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, they said to the newspaper. They communicated with walkie-talkies. They had been armed at all times and kept the crew locked up in groups of three or four. They allowed the cook out three times a day to prepare meals.
The crew dismissed the claims that the Arctic Sea had been smuggling weapons loaded during repairs in the Russian port of Kaliningrad. They said they would have been discovered when the ship docked in Finland to take on its cargo of timber.

There has been speculation that missiles could have been concealed in the freighter’s ballast tanks. Access to the tanks however is very tight and to secretly remove them, the Ladny would have had to first unload or dump the Arctic Sea’s cargo out at sea.

Israeli sources nevertheless insisted last week that Mossad had alerted Moscow to a secret cargo. Experts said the vessel might have been carrying weapon parts that could easily have been hidden.
The secret cargo theory should not be entirely ruled out until more light is shed on events surrounding the Arctic Sea and the men accused of seizing it – something many doubt will ever happen.

The Arctic Sea is now docked in Malta but the mystery is far from over. “The only people to really know the truth are the pirates themselves. Until they confess we are unlikely to ever know.”

Source: The Sunday Times – UK