Traces of Explosives Found at Nord Stream Sabotage Site: Swedish Prosecutor

German diplomat said in the recent interview that we will unlikely ever know who blew up the gas pipelines

Traces of an explosive device was located at the site of a Nord Stream pipeline explosion, a Swedish prosecutor said.

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Swedish prosecutors announced Friday that they found evidence at the site of the Nord Stream pipelines explosions that supports the claim that the gas pipelines were sabotaged.

The Wall Street Journal reported that a press officer at the Swedish security service hopes that a link can be made to the culprit. Explosive traces, when examined on a molecular level, can act as a fingerprint and potentially reveal where the material was manufactured and if it is military-grade, the paper said.

“Analysis carried out shows traces of explosives on several of the foreign objects that were found” at the site, Mats Ljungqvist of the Swedish Prosecution Authority said.

Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said Friday it was “very important to find those who are behind the explosion.”

Last September, three significant natural gas leaks were discovered in the vicinity of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic Sea. “Technogenic craters” were already located at the site. The widely held belief has been that some country, with a navy capable of detonating explosives up to 360 feet below the water surface, carried out a sabotage attack.

Christoph Heusgen, the German diplomat, told GZERO World, that he believes that Russia sabotaged its own pipelines, but noted that it will be almost impossible to prove.

His guess is that it was targeted by countries that have been against the pipelines from the beginning. He said if a Western country was responsible for the explosion, it would create major tension in the alliance.

“Objectively, it's going to be very, very difficult to do this research. It's at 100 meter below the surface...It will be very difficult to find out,” he said.

He also noted that even if a particular explosive was found, there’s a chance the guilty country intentionally used the device to cover its tracks. He said in the long run, it will likely not make any difference who was behind the attack.