Investigation under way after Finland-Sweden cables damaged

Authorities in Finland are investigating a broken fibre-optic cable after two separate cuts caused an outage affecting thousands of households.

The Swedish government said it suspected an act of "sabotage" on the cable, which links the two countries, but Finnish police said they did not yet have reason to suspect criminal activility.

One of the cuts has been fixed, while repairs continue on the other one, Nordic telecoms group GlobalConnect said. Around 6,000 households were reportedly affected in Finland.

There have been several cases of suspected infrastructure sabotage in the Baltic Sea region in recent weeks.

In a statement, Swedish Civil Defence Minister Carl-Oskar Bohlin said: "Due to the circumstances surrounding what happened, sabotage is suspected."

Finland's Minister of Transport and Communications Lulu Ranne posted on X: "The authorities are investigating the matter together with the company. We take the situation seriously."

Niklas Ekström, communications manager of GlobalConnect in Sweden, told the Aftonbladet newspaper that around 6,000 households in Finland were affected on Monday. The fault did not affect users in Sweden.

The period since Russia's full-fledged invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has seen heightened tension in the Baltic Sea and a number of incidents involving damage to undersea infrastructure.

Sweden has formally asked China to co-operate with an investigation into damage to two cables in the Baltic Sea last month.

The cables - one linking Sweden to Lithuania and the other between Finland and Germany - were damaged in Swedish territorial waters in the Baltic Sea on 17 and 18 November.

A Chinese ship, the Yi Peng Three, is believed to have been in the area at the time and has since been anchored in international waters off Denmark.