Missing Ship

[Sweejak]

This story is getting increasingly curious.

Report from RT

The “Arctic Sea”, a Maltese-registered vessel heading to Algeria with a cargo of timber, was last recorded on the AIS Live ship tracking system off the coast of Brest, northern France, at 1.29am on July 30. At that moment the ship was in the western part of the Bay of Biscay.

The ship was due to arrive in the Algerian port of Bejaia on August 4 – which it never did.

An incident which recently happened to the ship in the Baltic Sea has aroused the suspicion that the ship has been hijacked.

On July 24, masked men claiming to be police stopped the “Arctic Sea”, tied up the crew and searched the vessel.

According to the “Arctic Sea” crew’s report, after the 12-hour ordeal, the masked men left and the ship resumed its voyage – which is now doubted.

The British coastguards who were the last to have communicated with the ship on radio, on July 29 as the “Arctic Sea” passed along the English Channel, now suggest that the person speaking to them was “either a hijacker or a member of the crew with a gun pointed at his head”, the Independent says.

“We heard from this ship, not knowing it had been hijacked, on 29 July at 5.30 in the morning [local time]. They said they had 15 crew on board and they were going from Jacobstad [in Finland] to Bejaia,” Mark Clark of the UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) said.

“It wasn't until later that we had a report from the Zeebrugge [Belgian] police to say it had been hijacked off the coast of Sweden. The contact we had suggested everything was OK on the ship but we don't know if we were talking to a hijacker or a genuine crew member with a gun at his head,” Mark Clark added.

No distress signal has been passed by the ship since then, and the crew are believed to have twice made contact later – with investigators in Stockholm on July 31 and with Russia’s Archangelsk, where the relatives of the crew live and the ship’s operator is located, on August 1, Russian Vesti TV channel says.

I'm recalling the stories of the sinking of the Estonia, google up Brilliant Pebbles in regard to that sinking.

http://homepage.mac.com/kaaawa/iblog/C1 ... index.html

Also this is of interest, the 2nd segment particularly.

From AlJazeera on the countdown to war with
Iran. August 5, 2009

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dvl0lg5TTNU

2. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eE1et_xonUc

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJ1MYTwDBKU

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6LFYR53AXI

How can you lose a ship with millions in cargo. No GPS? No satellites?

[Occult Means Hidden]

According to the “Arctic Sea” crew’s report, after the 12-hour ordeal, the masked men left and the ship resumed its voyage – which is now doubted.

This suggests their crew reports are submitted online while at sea. They submit a report that they were captured then released but no one bothered to physically check in on them, being so close to Sweden too? Also if the hijackers were still on board and they faked the story that they left, then why allow the story of their arrival in the first place? If the answer is because the hijacking was reported in realtime, then fabricated story concoted once the hijackers gained control - then, If so, why wasn't there a real time response from authorities during those twelve hours?

[Penguin]

Yup this story has been in the news here for a while here.
Maybe Ill look up a few stories later.
Seems the crew was debriefed onboard or something, claimed the hijackers left when they clearly didn't (sailed thru English channel after), and police was notified after the fact (perhaps so they wouldn't try to board the ship?).
Somewhere I read the ship is operated by a finnish company, registered at Malta.

On a quick glance this wiki page seems pretty accurate ATM, compared to news reports Ive read in finnish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Arctic_Sea

The circumstances of the incident were not immediately reported by the ship's captain, who furthermore decided not stop for an investigation, but to continue sailing to Algeria. Sweden has later stated that its police force was not involved in boarding the vessel and launched an investigation.[6]

[edit] Disappearance

The ship, manned by a Russian crew of 15 people, was carrying a load of timber from Jakobstad, Finland to Béjaïa, Algeria when it was boarded in the early hours of July 24, 2009 by a group of eight to ten men, who approached on an inflatable boat, bearing the word polis (the Swedish word of police).[2] The intruders, claiming to be police officers, apprehended the crew, injuring some of them, and searched the ship.
...
The British Maritime and Coastguard Agency had a last known radio contact with the vessel, as it was passing through the Strait of Dover on July 28.[7] Nothing extraordinary was detected during the communication, though it is now suspected that the crew was coerced not to raise an alarm by the presumed hijackers. The ship continued to send the Automatic Identification System signals until July 30. A press-secretary of the Swedish Police Service confirmed that one of its investigators had a phone contact with a crew member on July 31, but refused to disclose its nature.[6] No communication has occurred since then; the ship failed to come to Béjaïa on August 5, its scheduled arrival date, or ever since

Sounds to me like the hijackers never left? And forced the crew to tell this version to the police, or something like that.
Timber, sure. Perhaps something else was aboard too, you would think there is a good reason for pulling a heist like that with so many navies around you..

http://www.hs.fi/english/article/Where+ ... 5248398283
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/au ... ip-pirates
http://www.maritimeaccident.org/idess/a ... #more-3556

Suggestions that the crew mau have been involved would appear unlikely. According to Bloomberg: "Victor Matveev, chief executive officer of Solchart, said in a telephone interview from Helsinki today...“We’ve operated this vessel for many, many years on a consecutive voyage basis between Finland and the Mediterranean, and this is more than disturbing,” Matveev said. “All the crew members have been working for our company for several years, they’re professional, well educated, and there are no newcomers. It makes us wonder what happened.”

Edit:
According to Helsingin Sanomat today, the owner of the ship is currently the same Solchart Management, based in Finland. All of the owners also reside in Finland, having finnish social security numbers despite being possibly russian citizens, which means they are officially residents here.

Solchart had a turnover of 24 mil euros the year before last, and half of that last year. They have around 20 cell phone numbers registered in Finland, most without names of owners, and an office plus one other flat in Helsinki. MTV 3 (TV channel) news could not determine if the owners have finnish citizenship. The ship itself sails under a Maltann flag.

From here - http://www.hs.fi/ulkomaat/artikkeli/Arc ... 5248431705

[marmot]

How can you lose a ship with millions in cargo. No GPS? No satellites?

On Tuesday I was riding with a friend in a vehicle when he showed me his cell phone display that had a map of where we were with a moving dot that indicated our present location - the tracking technology was accurate to within feet - it even gave the speed we were traveling at and updated our latitude / longitude. Scary!

Honestly, If their putting GPS devices in phones, rental cars and other vehicles - surely the ship would have some sort of tracking technology. Of course, a knowledgeable someone could probably dismantle it. But even so - someone somewhere has them on satellite - you would think.

[tazmic]

But even so - someone somewhere has them on satellite - you would think.
_________________
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. -TSE

Maybe a cloud passed?

[marmot]

But even so - someone somewhere has them on satellite - you would think.
_________________
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty. -TSE

Maybe a cloud passed?

btw, taz, as you're prob. already aware of - satellites have all sorts of imaging capabilities that can see right through clouds.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/space/systems/mti.htm

<><><><><><><><><><><><>><><><><><>

TOP SECRET: Not every light that streaks across the night sky is a Perseid. Some of them are spy satellites. Here's one gliding over Maghaberry, Northern Ireland, on August 10th:



"I went out to look for Perseids and instead I saw Lacrosse 3," reports photographer John McConnell.

Lacrosse 3 is a US National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite. Although it is top-secret, it often attracts attention to itself when sunlight glints brightly from its solar panels, rumored to span 45 meters from tip to tip. The solar arrays power a synthetic aperture radar, which can image Earth's surface with meter-resolution even through clouds. Some web sites claim that the radar can also sense objects underground, but that's just speculation.

"I couldn't mistake Lacrosse 3 because it was so bright," says McConnell. "This is even better than Perseids!"

[Sweejak]

Russia has sent subs to search. Subs?
Not a lot of this story makes sense, not as it's being told.

Being totally unrigorous here, but when I think of logs and what I might like to hide in them I have to think of missiles.

So who does Remote Viewing?

[beeline]

I'm guessing the extraterrestrial probes are approximately colon-deep at this point.

[beeline]

"I went out to look for Perseids and instead I saw Lacrosse 3," reports photographer John McConnell.

Lacrosse 3 is a US National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite. Although it is top-secret, it often attracts attention to itself when sunlight glints brightly from its solar panels, rumored to span 45 meters from tip to tip. The solar arrays power a synthetic aperture radar, which can image Earth's surface with meter-resolution even through clouds. Some web sites claim that the radar can also sense objects underground, but that's just speculation.

"I couldn't mistake Lacrosse 3 because it was so bright," says McConnell. "This is even better than Perseids!"

Off topic, but, I've seen the ISS numerous times since 1999. At this point, with the solar array, it is brighter than a Magnatude 1 star. Last time I saw it, it was docked with the shuttle on one pass, then about an hour later, the shuttle had seperated from it and was trailing behing it by several miles, but still in the same general orbit. Pretty cool. NASA used to have a site up (J-PASS I think it was called) that would give you its location in the sky relative to your position on Earth but they no longer offer that.

[Penguin]

Just as a sideline
I was thinking of the first mission of the game, reading those news ...
That tanker in the mission was off Norway.

http://toong.wordpress.com/2009/06/27/c ... on-review/

Plot:

The story unfolds with the televised execution of President Al-Fulani somewhere in the Middle East (no specific location is mentioned). You play the roles of John “Soap” MacTavish of the 22nd SAS Regiment and Paul Jackson of the USMC 1st Force Recon in attempts to quell an ultranationalist revolution aiming to restore the former Soviet Union. Imran Zakhaev, his son Victor, Kahled Al-Asad, and an unnamed second-in-command to the latter, together known as “The Four Horsemen,” must be eliminated. Espionage, airstrikes, nuclear detonations, and millions of empty shell casings ensue.

There are so many moments in this game that I have found to elicit school-boy glee. In one of the first USMC scenes, you make use of the Javelin anti-tank weapon. I’m sure fellow fans of “Future Weapons” got a kick out of that. Early showings of the game at E3 depicted ghillie-suited snipers in the Chernobyl disaster zone, infiltrating enemy lines. Stealth is rewarded immensely in that sequence and you eventually man a .50-caliber sniper rifle at a range of nearly a kilometer. However, the best part, by far, is when you are put into the gunner seat of an AC-130 “Spooky” Gunship. Through a thermal imaging camera, you are tasked with protecting the SAS squad on the ground using a 25mm gatling gun, a 40mm Bofors cannon, and a 105mm howitzer.Something foul is afoot in Russia and Britain’s Special Air Service knows it. Confirmation comes in the form of a nuclear warhead discovered during a nighttime tanker raid in stormy waters, the first true combat mission in the game.

One helluva propaganda game, that one. Playable and cinematic as well.

[psynapz]

"I went out to look for Perseids and instead I saw Lacrosse 3," reports photographer John McConnell.

Lacrosse 3 is a US National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite. Although it is top-secret, it often attracts attention to itself when sunlight glints brightly from its solar panels, rumored to span 45 meters from tip to tip. The solar arrays power a synthetic aperture radar, which can image Earth's surface with meter-resolution even through clouds. Some web sites claim that the radar can also sense objects underground, but that's just speculation.

"I couldn't mistake Lacrosse 3 because it was so bright," says McConnell. "This is even better than Perseids!"

Off topic, but, I've seen the ISS numerous times since 1999. At this point, with the solar array, it is brighter than a Magnatude 1 star. Last time I saw it, it was docked with the shuttle on one pass, then about an hour later, the shuttle had seperated from it and was trailing behing it by several miles, but still in the same general orbit. Pretty cool. NASA used to have a site up (J-PASS I think it was called) that would give you its location in the sky relative to your position on Earth but they no longer offer that.

You would be delighted to know that the same site from which marmot pulled that spy sat story offers a very nifty Satellite Fly-Bys database. I used it via a smartphone at a remote bonfire party recently to predict an ISS flyover and it was marvelous. Especially looking around and seeing a whole party stop dead to stare at the sky and chorus in wows because I screamed at them to. Felt good.

[Sweejak]

I've been following a debate on dual citizenship and holding two passports in Russia and the surrounding states, it's fairly standard stuff to have a SS (or equivalent) number in another country or to even to have two passports. A lot of people were stuck in former USSR areas, what to do with them? Russia offered citizenship as did some of the newly independent states resulting in a lot of wiggle room. This is usually used to suggest Russia is planting citizens into former USSR states, and maybe some of that is true, but the taking of passports is voluntary.

Anyway, here's today's RT report.
http://www.russiatoday.ru/Top_News/2009 ... acked.html

[Sweejak]

One helluva propaganda game, that one. Playable and cinematic as well.

I've made it a minor specialty to track Russophobia. I do a little newsletter, it's kinda on and off again, but PM me if you want on the list.

[MinM]

Penny for your thoughts: What happened to the Russian Ship??

Russian President orders navy to hunt for missing 'piracy' ship Arctic Sea - Times Online

Russian Ship Goes Missing - CBS News Video

Missing ship may have secret cargo - mirror.co.uk

[Sweejak]

Just to be picky, it's a Finnish ship, not Russian, sailing under a Maltese flag with a mostly Russian crew.

MOSCOW (Reuters) Thursday August 13, 2009

Russia's navy is following a ship near Gibraltar similar to the merchant vessel that disappeared last month after passing through the English Channel, the editor of a shipping journal said on state television on Thursday.

"I have just learned from a defence ministry source that the frigate Ladny is right now pursuing a ship similar to the Arctic Star in the Atlantic just south of Gibraltar," Mikhail Boytenko, editor of Russia's Sovfracht maritime journal, told the Vesti-24 news channel.

Copyright © 2008 Reuters