The mystery surrounding the hijacking of a Russian freighter in July has taken a new twist with reports claiming the pirates were acting in league with the Israeli Mossad secret service in order to halt a shipment of modern weapon systems hidden on board and destined for Iran.
While Israeli and Russian officials dismissed the reports, accounts published in the Russian media sounded more like a spy thriller than a commercial hijacking.
"There is something fishy about this whole story, no doubt about it," Israel's former Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh told The Media Line. "But I can't comment further on this."
The Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta reported over the weekend that the vessel Arctic Sea had been carrying x-55 cruise missiles and S300 anti-aircraft rockets hidden in secret compartments among its cargo of timber and sawdust.
The eight alleged hijackers originally claimed to be environmentalists when they boarded the ship in the Baltic Sea in Swedish waters on July 24. The Russian navy eventually tracked it down three weeks later an recaptured near the West African archipelago of Cape Verde on August 17, thousands of miles from its original destination of Algeria.
The eight alleged hijackers were charged late Friday with kidnapping and piracy, the Interfax news agency reported. Russian authorities have declined from revealing further information about the motives of the hijackers.
But Dmitri Rogozin, Russian ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, said that allegations that the Arctic Sea had been smuggling weapons was "fantasy" and "ridiculous."
The Russian newspaper Pravda's website reported that the ship had been smuggling cruise missiles to Iran on a well-worn path via Algeria, but a "power that has relations with Ukraine" had prevented this. The Novaya Gazeta reported that the hijackers had been operating on behalf of the Mossad. It also reported that the motive for the visit to Moscow by Israel's President Shimon Peres the day after the Russians recaptured the vessel had been an urgent request to his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev to refrain from supplying Iran with weapons.
Israeli officials dismissed the reports as "classical conspiracy theories," but defense experts noted that Israel has a record of hijacking foreign vessels bearing arms to its enemies.
"This appears as the classical conspiracy theory. I didn't see any evidence for it and so we aren't going to comment," said Yigal Palmor, a spokesman for the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem.
A spokeswoman for President Peres also dismissed the report, saying that the visit had been planned long in advance.
Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Shlomo Brom, a senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, did not rule out Israel covert action against Iranian efforts to acquire nuclear arms, but seriously suspected Israel would take action against Russian ships.
"It seems that it's full of mystery since everything surrounding Russia is mysterious. And if it's mysterious they dump it on Israel," Brom told The Media Line.
Brom, a retired senior intelligence officer, added he did not believe it could enhance the Mossad's image since it appeared to be a failed hijacking.
Israel relies heavily on intelligence. Naval intelligence monitors vessels together with other agencies in order to detect suspicious behavior of ships around the world. It was this way that Naval intelligence was able to detect the PLO arms ship Karine A in 2002. They noticed its log was not entirely in keeping with a cargo ship and correlated to other intelligence to build a picture of an arms shipment in the making. The weapons had originated in Iran.
Israeli security agents routinely stage surprise at-sea boardings of ships headed to Israeli ports to search for terrorists, contraband and stowaways.
In March, Israeli forces reportedly struck a weapons convoy in Sudan, some 1,400 kilometers from the country's borders.
According to the CBS, the weapons were intended for Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Nearly 40 people were killed in that attack.
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