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Kremlin Suggests Hijacked Ship Held 'More Than Just Lumber'
MOSCOW -- One week after Russia said one of its warships seized a freighter laden with lumber and liberated the Russian crew from pirates, Moscow said the ship may have been carrying more than timber after all.

The comments from a top Russian official, Alexander Bastrykin, are likely to deepen speculation around the history of the ship, the Arctic Sea, which the government had insisted was a victim of rare piracy in European waters. After the crew reported being attacked by pirates off Sweden in July, the ship disappeared—before Russia announced it had found it intact, with its crew, off the west coast of Africa.

"We aren't excluding the possibility that they could have been carrying more than just lumber," Mr. Bastrykin said Tuesday, according to Russia's Interfax news agency. The comments by Mr. Bastrykin, head of the powerful Investigative Committee, which reports to Russia's president, are the first official concession that the ship might have been carrying sensitive cargo.

Observers in Russia and abroad say the strange behavior of the crew as well as the Kremlin's response suggest the ship may have been smuggling arms or drugs. The ship was officially carrying a load of timber to Algeria, which experts say wasn't worth the cost of mounting such a caper on the high seas.
Algeria could get timber from sources a lot closer unless the order specifically called for Russian birch. And even then it would have been shipped from a Russian port on the Black Sea.
Since Russia seized the ship, its crew has been held incommunicado, and family members have complained they are unable to talk to the crew. Some of the crew were allowed to call family Tuesday to report they were in good health, Interfax said, but they still weren't allowed to reveal their whereabouts.
Why it almost seems as if the crew are being treated as suspects ...
Russia has dismissed suggestions of arms or drug smuggling aboard the Arctic Sea, and says the piracy appears to be a mundane case of hijacking for ransom. Russia's foreign ministry said in a statement Tuesday that an initial check of the Arctic Sea's cargo revealed "nothing suspicious," but that a closer inspection was needed to settle the question.

None of the official court filings contains a reference to the smuggling of weapons, a defense attorney for two of the alleged hijackers said Tuesday. "There is no mention of [illegal] arms," said Konstantin Boronovsky, in an interview with Radio Ekho Moskvy. He stressed, however, that he could only cite files he had been able to read.

Mr. Bastrykin said investigators have been holding the crew because it was unclear whether some of them may have been involved in the hijacking. "We need to figure out whether someone might have been involved," he said.

The ship itself is bypassing Algeria, where it was supposed to unload its cargo of timber, and is being taken to the Russian port of Novorossiisk, Mr. Bastrykin said, where it will undergo a search. A port official in Novorossiisk said the ship would only arrive in mid- to late September, Russian government news agency RIA Novosti reported.

Mikhail Voitenko, editor of trade magazine Maritime Bulletin, said the government likely knows what the Arctic Sea's contents are, but is undecided about what to reveal. He said it would have been irrational, however, for pirates to seize a load of timber.

"If it's a criminal cargo, it would have to be a very large one to make this worthwhile," he said. "If it's three or four thousand tons of heroin, I can understand this. Otherwise this makes no sense."
Posted by: Steve White 2009-08-26
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=277503