Divers used chartered yacht to sabotage Nord Stream pipelines – report

theguardian.com:

The underwater bombing of the Nord Stream gas pipelines last September was carried out by a team of divers operating from a 15-metre chartered yacht called the Andromeda, according to a new report.

The report in Der Spiegel traces the Andromeda’s route around the Baltic from its home marina in Rostock on 6 September to the German island of Rügen and then finally to the Danish island of Christiansø, close to the site of the blasts on 26 September.

Experts have questioned whether the amount of explosives used in the sabotage attacks, estimated to be several hundred kilograms, as well with the necessary breathing apparatus and other equipment could have been carried on such a small boat, raising the question of whether another vessel was involved.

Der Spiegel said that one of the six-person crew on the Andromeda was using a forged Bulgarian passport, but the German investigators have yet to identify the nationality of the bombers, or attribute responsibility to any government. A New York Times report this week cited intelligence sources as saying a pro-Ukrainian group was involved, but German authorities have warned about the possibility of a “false-flag” operations in which misleading clues are left deliberately to point in the wrong direction.

The Ukrainian government has denied any involvement in the attack on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines, which were built to transport natural gas from Russia to Germany, and are majority-owned by the Russian state-owned company Gazprom. They were not operational at the time of the attack, which came seven months after Vladimir Putin’s all-out invasion of Ukraine, but they were filled with gas, which bubbled to the surface, creating a wide area of visible turbulence.

The Spiegel quotes a