Norway has detained a vessel carrying Russians on suspicion of damaging a cable.

The Norwegian police, at the request of the Latvian authorities, detained the vessel Silver Dania with a Russian crew on suspicion of damaging an underwater communication cable in the Baltic Sea.

The ship has been brought to the port of Tromsø, according to Deutsche Welle citing the police.

Law enforcement is conducting searches and interrogations aboard the Silver Dania and collecting evidence. The vessel, which operated between Saint Petersburg and Murmansk, is registered in Norway, with a Norwegian legal entity as its owner.

Meanwhile, Tormod Fossmark, head of Silver Sea, the company that owns the vessel, dismissed accusations of any illegal activity.

“We passed near Gotland, but we did not drop anchor,” Fossmark said, as reported by AFP. He explained that the Norwegian authorities brought the ship to port to clear the crew of suspicions regarding the cable damage.

As reported, on the morning of January 26, a fiber optic cable connecting the Latvian city of Ventspils and the Swedish island of Gotland was damaged in the Baltic Sea. Latvian military inspected the vessel Michalis San, which was near the incident site, but found no suspicious activity on deck or anchor damage. This vessel sails under the Panamanian flag and was heading to Russia.

For its part, the Swedish prosecutor's office has launched an investigation into the “large-scale sabotage” and detained the vessel Vezhen, suspected of being involved in the incident. According to the Vesselfinder resource, this ship had left the Russian port of Ust-Luga a few days prior and was in the area between Gotland and Latvia when the communication cable was damaged.

In recent months, there have been multiple incidents of damage to critical telecommunications and energy cables in the Baltic Sea. Some experts and politicians see these as attacks organized on behalf of Russia and carried out by a "shadow" fleet of the RF.

At the same time, US and EU intelligence services concluded that the incidents were more likely accidents rather than acts of sabotage by Russia, according to a January 19 report by The Washington Post citing unnamed sources.