Finland's National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) has recovered what appears to be the missing anchor from the Eagle S, which allegedly cut four subsea telecom cables and a high-voltage power cable in the Baltic Sea on Christmas Day.
The NBI tactical leader, Detective Superintendent Risto Lohi, said in a statement on Thursday that the bureau was working on a forensic analysis of the anchor as part of its criminal investigation into the incident.
“The anchor is undergoing a technical examination, including steps to confirm that it belongs to the tanker Eagle S,” Lohi said.
The anchor, raised during the joint operation by authorities on January 6, measures approximately 4 metres in length, 2.5 metres in width, and it weighs 11 tons.
The technical examination will focus on the question of when the anchor became detached from its chain. The location where the anchor was found is near the place where Finnish authorities instructed the tanker Eagle S to raise the anchor it had been dragging.
“If the anchor only came loose during the hoisting, it is likely that the anchor could have caused further damage to the seabed infrastructure if the vessel had continued its journey,” Lohi said.
The sequence of events leading up to the ruptures is already clear in a technical sense to the police, but there is still a lot of technical data storage media to be analysed, the bureau said in the statement.
Underwater investigations have determined the length of the drag trace on the seabed to be approximately 100 kilometres. The police are continuing to analyse the drag trace.
The Helsinki Police Department is leading the operation in the Gulf of Finland, and the Border Guard and Defence Forces are contributing to the operation.
