Finland cable breaches not being investigated as crime, police say (updated)

Elisa Oyj

03/12/2024 06:47

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      Two land-based data cables broke in Finland late on Monday
    

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      One of the breaches likely happened due to excavation work
    

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      No criminal probe has been opened, police say
    

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      Authorities investigating, Finnish minister says
    

  
 (Adds Finnish police in paragraph 1, 3-4)
       HELSINKI, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Finland does not have reason
to suspect that the breach of two separate land-based
fibre-optic cables was an act of crime, police said on Tuesday,
as authorities and owners work to establish the exact cause of
the outages.
        Nordic telecoms groups GlobalConnect and Elisa said one
of the two breaches that occurred on Monday was likely due to
excavation work. GlobalConnect is still investigating the second
incident.
    Finnish police are seeking to establish what happened but
have not opened a criminal investigation at this stage.
        "Based on the current information, we don't have reason
to suspect a crime in this case," Inspector Teemu Saukoniemi of
the National Police Board of Finland told Reuters.
  
    One of the cables had been repaired by Tuesday morning.
        The disruption followed recent breaches of two undersea
fibre-optic communications cables in the Baltic Sea, which
raised suspicions of potential sabotage.
    "The authorities are investigating the matter together with
the company. We take the situation seriously," Finland's
Minister of Transport and Communications Lulu Ranne said in a
post on social media X.
    The breaches happened on a connection that links Finland and
Sweden, a spokesperson for the Swedish Post and Telecom
Authority said.
    "Due to the circumstances surrounding what happened,
sabotage is suspected," Swedish Civil Defence Minister
Carl-Oskar Bohlin said in a statement.

 (Reporting by Stine Jacobsen, Louise Breusch Rasmussen, Johan
Ahlander, Elviira Luoma and Anne Kauranen, editing by Terje
Solsvik and Ed Osmond)
 ((stine.jacobsen@thomsonreuters.com; +45 2156 90 10;))