Was the cargo ship Arctic Sea really hijacked by pirates?
It's one of the biggest maritime puzzles since the Mary Celeste. In July a Russian-crewed cargo ship vanished off the coast of Finland. Moscow claims it was hijacked. Now one of the accused exclusively reveals a very different version of events . . .
It began as a curio item on an obscure maritime website and grew into the mystery of the summer. What exactly happened to the Arctic Sea, the enigmatic cargo ship allegedly seized by pirates, not off the wild coast of Somalia but in the genteel EU waters of the Baltic?
Two months after the ship was "hijacked", the answer is now clear – at least according to Russian investigators. Last week, they announced they had finished their probe into one of the biggest maritime puzzles since another ill-starred merchant ship, the Mary Celeste, was found drifting, crewless, in the Atlantic. And according to Moscow, the story is reassuringly simple. Eight armed "pirates" seized the Arctic Sea in the late evening of 24 July, off the coast of Sweden. The pirates told the captain to sail for Africa. The Arctic Sea then slipped through the Channel and "disappeared" on or around 30 July, prompting a frantic international search.
Three weeks later, on 17 August, a Russian naval frigate found and intercepted the boat some 300 miles off the Cape Verde Islands. Russian officers arrested the "pirates", who turned out to be a bunch of ethnic Russians from Estonia and Latvia. They also freed the Arctic Sea's 15 Russian crew members. This bold mission, the Kremlin claims, involving ships, military aircraft and other resources, was a national triumph. There's only one problem with Moscow's version of events: it just doesn't stack up.
Sitting in his Moscow office, Konstantin Baranovsky – lawyer for one of the "pirates" – calmly recounts an alternative reality. His client is Dmitry Bartenev, a 41-year-old sailor who was born and lives in Estonia's capital, Tallinn. His grandfather was a Soviet admiral, his father worked for the Soviet commercial fleet.
Bartenev, his lawyer says, paints a completely different picture of events surrounding the Arctic Sea. There was no hijacking, and he is not a pirate. Instead, Bartenev claims that he and his seven colleagues are harmless "ecologists" who had been working for an unnamed organisation.
"He's told me what that organisation is, but he won't let me disclose it. I don't know why," says Baranovsky.
Bartenev's account, relayed by his lawyer, goes like this. On 24 July, he and his colleagues set off before dawn from the Estonian summer beach resort of Pärnu. Heading off into the grey and choppy Baltic Sea in their soft-hulled inflatable dinghy, they were testing a new GPS unit. But the expedition turned out to be a terrible mistake.
"Suddenly a big wave hit us," Bartenev told his lawyer from prison. "Water flooded our navigation system and broke it. Our engine started to work badly. We lost our bearings. Then it got dark. We saw two ships up ahead of us. One of them was a big passenger liner – but it was going too fast. The other was the Arctic Sea. It had a low hull. We headed for it."
According to Bartenev, the Arctic Sea's crew plucked his seven friends from their stricken boat while he stayed at the wheel. Finally they rescued him, then winched on board his battered dinghy.
"The crew were very friendly. When they realised we were Russians, they took us to the saloon bar and cracked open a bottle of vodka. There was a lot of booze on the Arctic Sea: whisky and strong alcohol of all kinds."
Bartenev says he asked the captain to put them ashore at the nearest port – but the request was refused without explanation. So with no immediate prospect of getting off, they relaxed.
Russian investigators have portrayed their three weeks on board the Arctic Sea as a tense hostage drama. In fact, Bartenev says, it was more like a jolly P&O cruise – with swimming, sunbathing and drinks under a twinkling tropical sky.
"There was a swimming pool; the crew had improvised it at the bottom of the ship. We swam in it. There was also a gym, which we were allowed to use. We spent a lot of time sunbathing," Bartenev says. "We slept in a small cabin. We made friends with several engineers and the cook. He cooked for us together with everybody else."
Crucially, Bartenev says he had no idea that the ship was, by now, at the centre of an international search. Having set off on 22 July from the Finnish port of Jakobstad with a cargo of timber, the Arctic Sea was, according to Moscow, supposed to reach the port of Bejaia in Algeria, on 4 August.
"We didn't realise it had gone missing," Bartenev insists. He and his colleagues did, however, notice that the ship was veering several thousand miles in the wrong direction, down the west coast of Africa. "It got warmer. We were clearly heading south," he told his lawyer.
This muggy equatorial odyssey finally ended at lunchtime on 17 August, when the Russian naval frigate, the Ladny, came alongside. The Arctic Sea's crew had spotted the heavily armed vessel two days previously and, according to Bartenev, its ominous appearance prompted his new companions to nervously break out the vodka again. "We spent the last two nights on board getting drunk with the crew," he explains.
Strangely, the Arctic Sea's captain informed the pursuing Russians that his vessel was North Korean. But this merely delayed the inevitable – an order to come aboard the Ladny. At 11.41am, Russian personnel arrested Bartenev. They took him and the other "pirates" to a military airport on the Cape Verde islands.
From there, he was whisked by Ilyushin Il-76 military plane to Moscow, chucked in jail and charged with kidnapping and piracy. Eleven of the Arctic Sea's sailors were also flown back to Moscow for interrogation, and subsequently barred from talking to the press. The captain, Sergei Zaretsky, and three others stayed behind.
One month later they are still on the boat, which instead of heading back to Russia has been kept out of view somewhere near the Canary Islands. Baranovsky describes Russian investigators' account of the drama as "ludicrous". He poses the obvious question: why would anybody want to hijack a ship full of wood?
"The official version of the incident isn't true. It looks like eight mad guys took a rubber boat, went into the centre of the Baltic Sea, and grabbed a ship full of lumber. It's not only strange, it's unbelievable."
Of course, Bartenev's story also appears dubious in places, especially his claim to be an ecologist. (The sailor has two "Celtic" tattoos on his upper arms – not very Greenpeace.) Nonetheless, his testimony – with its credibly banal account of life on board the Arctic Sea – blows a hole in the official version of events. His suggestion that there was no hijacking, and that the crew were at no stage under duress, is backed by the official investigators' concession that there were, in fact, no weapons on board the Arctic Sea.
A more likely scenario is that Bartenev and his fellow "pirates" were set up. But by whom? Over the past month, speculation has swirled in Russian and British papers that the Arctic Sea was carrying a secret consignment of S-300 anti-aircraft interceptors, destined for Tehran.
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