A Finnish district court has dismissed charges against the captain and two officers of the Eagle S tanker, ruling that Finland has no jurisdiction to prosecute over the damage of critical subsea infrastructure in the Baltic Sea last year.
The case, seen as a test of how maritime law applies to attacks or accidents involving subsea power and telecoms cables, centred on the incident in the Gulf of Finland last December. Prosecutors alleged the Cook Islands-flagged vessel dragged its anchor for 90 km across the seabed, severing the Estlink 2 power cable linking Finland and Estonia, along with four data communication cables.
The crew — the Georgian master, a Georgian first officer and an Indian second officer — were charged with aggravated criminal mischief and aggravated interference with telecommunications. They denied wrongdoing, arguing the anchor dropped unnoticed due to faults in the vessel’s winch system.
Prosecutors claimed gross negligence, citing the poor state of the winch, and had sought prison terms of at least two and a half years. Cable operators also filed damage claims running into tens of millions of euros.
In its ruling, the court stated that Finnish criminal law could not be applied, as the damage occurred in international waters. “The District Court has today issued a judgment dismissing the charge in the case… along with the claims for damages arising from the charge, as it was not possible to apply Finnish criminal law to the case,” it said.
No charges were filed against the ship’s owner, and the tanker was released in March.
The incident, one of several cable and pipeline outages in the Baltic since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, prompted NATO forces to step up regional patrols and monitoring of subsea infrastructure.
