Mystery ship being checked by Russia for secret cargo
Russia's top general said on Thursday the military would search the Arctic Sea for any possible secret cargo when it returned to Russia from a maritime odyssey that made headlines round the world. Russia says the Maltese-registered Arctic Sea, officially carrying timber from Finland to Algeria, was hijacked by eight men off the coast of Sweden on July 24. Russian warships found the ship in the Atlantic off the Cape Verde islands on Aug. 17. Russia has released little information about the ship and the eight men - citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Russia - suspected of hijacking it are in Moscow's high security Lefortovo prison. Piracy is extremely rare in well-policed northern European waters and maritime experts have asked why anyone would risk seizing an elderly ship carrying $US2 million worth of timber and then sail for Africa. "We do not rule out the possibility that they might have been carrying not only timber," Alexander Bastrykin, head of the the prosecutor-general's main investigations unit, said in an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta published on Wednesday.
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