Published 15 July 2021 at 18.41
Domestic. Video footage taken by the Estonian newspaper Postimee's photographer Madis Veltman from the ongoing dives off Estonia shows that the hole in the hull that the Swedish Maritime Administration and the Swedish Accident Investigation Board claim to have “missed” during the 1994 dives appears impossible to miss.
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Estonia Disaster
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The background to the investigation is the journalist Henrik Evertsson's documentary “The find that changes everything” from 2020. The documentary showed how Evertsson and his team sent a robot camera down from the ship Fritz Reuter to Estonia's wreck in September 2019, and filmed the hole in the hull up close.
At the time of its sinking in 1994, Estonia had operated the Stockholm – Tallinn route for almost a year. The ferry line itself was added in 1991 on the initiative of the then Prime Minister Carl Bildt, in order to be able to smuggle secret weapon technology to the US side from the collapsing Soviet Union after the Cold War. Under the guise of ordinary passenger traffic, operations continued until 28 September 1994, when the ship suddenly sank under mysterious circumstances in the middle of the Baltic Sea.
Despite the fact that the Finnish ferries Silja Europa and Viking Mariella were in place almost immediately, neither they nor any of the other five ships that arrived at the scene of the accident sank in any lifeboats. Only Finnish and Swedish naval rescue and the military participated in the ineffective rescue operation, which was conducted entirely by helicopters. In Sweden, priority was also given to loading so many journalists on board the helicopters that there was almost no room left to take on board those in need, who were instead left in life rafts where they froze to death.
As a result of the sinking and the ineffective rescue effort, 852 people died in the disaster, many of whom froze to death in life rafts. Relatives have since demanded new dives and investigations, but received no. Instead, the government has introduced a law on grave peace and refused to investigate why only military units participated in the rescue operation.
The Swedish and Estonian governments have also had certain parts of the wreck cast in stone and sand. The cause of the accident can therefore be difficult to investigate even for those who dive at the wreck.
In a report in Assignment review 2004, it was revealed that Sweden smuggled military equipment on Estonia one week and two weeks before the disaster. After the revelation, the government commissioned the lawyer Johan Hirschfeldt to investigate whether the Armed Forces had smuggled weapons even on the night of the accident. However, Hirschfeldt was not allowed to investigate whether the authority that handled the smuggling in Estonia, the KSI authority, had smuggled something on the night of the accident.
It later emerged that Hirschfeldt had destroyed all investigative material and obscured a series of information that could have clarified why Estonia sank.