Finland police investigate role of foreign ship after power cable outage

OSLO (Reuters) - Finnish police said on Thursday they are investigating whether a foreign ship was involved in the damage of an undersea power cable connecting Finland and Estonia following a sudden outage on Wednesday.

Baltic Sea nations are on high alert for potential acts of sabotage following a string of outages of power cables, telecom links and gas pipelines since 2022, although subsea equipment is also subject to technical malfunction and accidents.

The 658 megawatt (MW) Estlink 2 power interconnector remains offline following the outage that began at midday local time on Wednesday, leaving only the 358 MW Estlink 1 in operation between the two countries, operator Fingrid said.

"The police, in cooperation with the Border Guard and other authorities, are investigating the chain of events of the incident," Finnish police said in a statement.

Investigators were probing the potential role of a foreign ship, police said without naming the vessel.

Police in Sweden are meanwhile leading an investigation into the breach last month of two Baltic Sea telecom cables, in an incident German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has said he assumed was caused by sabotage.

Separately, Finnish police continue to investigate damage caused last year to the Balticconnector gas pipeline linking Finland and Estonia, as well as several telecoms cables, and have said this was likely caused by a ship dragging its anchor.

In 2022 the Russia-to-Germany Nord Stream gas pipelines running along the seabed in the same waters were blown up, in a case still under investigation by Germany.

(Reporting by Terje Solsvik; Editing by Chris Reese)