Finland moves tanker suspected of undersea cable damage closer to port

OSLO (Reuters) - Finnish authorities said on Saturday they are moving an impounded tanker closer to port after boarding the vessel carrying Russian oil earlier this week on suspicion it had damaged an undersea power line and four telecoms cables.

Baltic Sea nations have been on high alert after a string of outages of power cables, telecom links and gas pipelines since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, and NATO said on Friday it would boost its presence in the region.

The Cook Islands-registered ship, named by authorities as the Eagle S, was boarded on Thursday by a Finnish coast guard crew that took command and sailed the vessel to Finnish waters, a coast guard official said.

Finnish police believe the Eagle S may have caused the damage to undersea cables the previous day by dragging its anchor along the seabed.

"The police begin an operation to transfer the Eagle S tanker from the Gulf of Finland to Svartbeck, an inner anchorage near the port of Kilpilahti," the Helsinki police department said in a statement on Saturday.

This would be a better place to carry out investigations, it added.

Finland's customs service believes the ship is part of a "shadow fleet" of ageing tankers being used to evade sanctions on the sale of Russian oil.

The Kremlin said on Friday Finland's seizure of the ship was of little concern to it. In the past, Russia has denied involvement in any of the Baltic infrastructure incidents.

(Reporting by Terje Solsvik; Editing by Frances Kerry)