Ynet: Russia commandeered rogue arms shipment to Iran

Counters TIME report linking mysterious hijacking to Israel

By ICEJ News

03 Sep 2009

While Israel was implicated this week in the mysterious hijacking of a Russian cargo ship this summer, the leading Hebrew daily Yedioth Aharnot released the results of their own investigation on Wednesday which pointed to the Kremlin as ordering its own commando team to take over the vessel after learning it was carrying a rogue shipment of S-300 missiles to Iran.

The incident arose when the Russian ship the ‘Arctic Sea’ left Finland on July 21 and was apparently seized while still near the Baltic Sea – making it the first case of piracy in European waters in modern memory.

Asked to explain the caper, Estonian admiral Tarmo Kouts, the EU rapporteur on piracy, told Time magazine this week it was simply his hunch that the vessel was intercepted by Israeli agents as it was likely carrying a secret cargo of advanced weapons to the Middle East. This theory, which Russian analysts also later put forward, has been vehemently denied by Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, who was quoted as saying Kouts should stop "running his mouth."

Now the Ynet probe has unearthed a different account in which the ship originated in the Baltic exclave of Kaliningrad, a Russian port operated by unions of security operatives from the former Soviet Union and a hotbed for international weapons smuggling. It was reportedly loaded with a stockpile of advanced S-300 anti-aircraft missiles and X-500 anti-ship missiles, and then docked in a Finnish port to take on a load of timber as cover.

Once at sea, it was commandeered by eight operatives in a ‘stranded’ vessel who asked to be taken on board. The vessel then ‘disappeared’ for some three weeks before the Russian navy announced it had located and secured the ship near the Azores.

Ynet concludes that the Kremlin was tipped off by an unnamed “foreign intelligence agency” that Russian businessmen and perhaps military officers were transporting the missiles to Iran via Algeria in a black market operation, and it was Moscow itself that dispatched a team of submarine-borne frogmen to commandeer their own vessel.

The Russian government was apparently concerned the deal would violate an agreement it had signed with the US and Israel not to export any advanced weapons systems to the region that would significantly alter the balance of power in the Middle East.

The mystery has deepened somewhat due to an unannounced visit that Israeli President Shimon Peres paid to Moscow the day after Russia claimed it had found the ship and arrested the crew on August 18.

And in the latest twist, the BBC reported today that Russian journalist Mikhail Voitenko, who first reported the ship missing and has questioned the official account being offered by Moscow, has fled to Turkey after receiving a threatening phone call from what he suspected was a state intelligence agent.

Meanwhile, the UN Security Council lauded the United Arab Emirates for intercepting a ship full of banned North Korean weapons on its way to Iran in violation of UN resolution 1874. Al Arabiya reported that the UAE Navy had intercepted several weapons shipments bound for Iran.

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