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Sweden has confiscated a cargo ship believed to be part of Russia’s “shadow fleet” which was seized in early March suspected of transporting stolen Ukrainian grain, the country’s prosecution service said on Wednesday.
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The 96-metre Caffa was headed for St. Petersburg when armed Swedish police boarded it on 6 March.
They detained a crew member “suspected of violations of the maritime code and the ship safety act, as well as the use of a forged document.”
The Swedish Prosecution Authority said in a statement on Wednesday that the ship had now been confiscated following a request for “legal assistance” from a foreign state, without disclosing which country had made the request.
“A foreign authority has asked for certain investigative measures to be carried out in Sweden, including one related to the vessel Caffa,” prosecutor Hakan Larsson said in a statement.
“I have decided to confiscate the vessel in order for the court to examine whether it can be handed over to the other state,” Larsson said.
In March, Sweden’s coastguard said the ship was on Ukraine’s sanctions list and was sailing under a false Guinean flag.
Russia’s embassy in Stockholm has said that 10 of the 11 crew members are Russian nationals.
The coastguard’s acting head of operations, Daniel Stenling, told journalists in March that they had information indicating “that it has essentially been used to transport grain that is stolen, as we understand it, from Ukraine.”
Russia has reportedly built up a flotilla of old oil tankers of opaque ownership to get around sanctions imposed by the European Union, as well as the United States and the G7 group of nations, over Moscow’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
The sanctions, aimed at limiting Moscow’s revenues used to pursue its war, have shut out many tankers carrying Russian oil from Western insurance and shipping systems.
Some experts and political leaders also suspect the vessels of carrying out sabotage, as part of a “hybrid war” by Russia against Western countries.
In Finland, three crew members from the Cook Islands-registered “shadow fleet” ship Eagle S were accused of dragging the vessel’s anchor across the seabed in the Gulf of Finland in December 2024, damaging five undersea cables.
While in late January, the French navy boarded a sanctioned vessel believed to be a Russian oil tanker flying a false flag in the Mediterranean.
Additional sources • AFP
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