A Chinese ship is once again at the centre of a European infrastructure attack.
Yi Peng 3, a 23-year-old panamax bulk carrier owned by Ningbo Yipeng Shipping, is the top suspect linked to the severing of two data cables in the Baltic Sea in recent days.
The ship departed from the Russian port of Ust-Luga heading to Port Said in Egypt over the weekend with its route tracking passing over both the Swedish-Lithuanian and Finnish-German fibre-optic cables around the time each was cut on Sunday and Monday. Latest tracking data from VesselFinder shows the ship has been stopped with two Danish military vessels either side of it.
German defence minister Boris Pistorius commented, “No one believes that these cables were cut by accident. I also don’t subscribe to theories suggesting that ship anchors caused the damage to the cables.”
In October last year, a communication cable between Sweden and Estonia and a gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia suffered damage caused by the Chinese-controlled NewNew Polar Bear containership.
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