MOSCOW — The high-seas mystery over the freighter Arctic Sea was far from solved Monday after the Russian navy found the ship off West Africa, far from the Algerian port where it was supposed to dock two weeks ago.
Was the ship attacked near Sweden as reported? Was this an unheard-of case of piracy in European waters? Or a murky commercial dispute? Why was the Arctic Sea found off Cape Verde, about 2,000 miles from its intended port?
Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov informed President Dmitry Medvedev that the ship was found about 300 miles from Cape Verde and that the 15 crew members were taken aboard another vessel for questioning.
The details stopped there.
Since the Arctic Sea sailed from the Finnish port of Pietarsaari on July 21 with an $1.8 million cargo of timber, rumors and unconfirmed reports of misadventure have followed it.
On July 30, Swedish police said the ship’s owner had reported that the crew claimed the vessel was boarded by masked men July 24 near the Swedish island of Gotland. The invaders reportedly tied up the crew, beat them, claimed they were looking for drugs and sped off in an inflatable craft.
By the time the Swedish report emerged, the ship had already passed through the English Channel, where it made its last known radio contact July 28. Signals from the ship’s tracking device were picked up off France’s coast the next day, but that was the last known trace of it until Monday.
The Arctic Sea was scheduled to make port Aug. 4 in Algeria. After it was late by more than a week, Medvedev told the defense ministry to use all necessary means to find it.
Adding to the mystery, Russia’s envoy to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, told the ITAR-Tass news agency Monday that bogus information was deliberately provided to the news media “which did not allow them to calculate the true actions of the Russian forces.”
With details still sparse, Viktor Matveyev, director of the ship’s operator, Solchart, told The Associated Press: “We are all incredibly happy. Now the big work starts to find out what happened.”
