Poland received German request to arrest suspect in Nord Stream probe

By Rachel More and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk

BERLIN (Reuters) -Poland has received a European arrest warrant issued by Berlin in connection with the 2022 attack on Nord Stream pipelines, but the suspect has already left Poland as Germany failed to include his name in a database of wanted persons, Polish prosecutors told Reuters.

The multi-billion dollar Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines transporting gas under the Baltic Sea were ruptured by a series of blasts in September 2022, seven months after Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

German investigators believe the Ukrainian diver was part of a team that planted the explosives, the SZ and Die Zeit newspapers reported alongside the ARD broadcaster, citing unnamed sources.

Polish National Public Prosecutor's Office spokeswoman Anna Adamiak said German authorities sent a European arrest warrant to the District Prosecutor's Office in Warsaw in June in the case of Ukrainian citizen Volodymyr Z., in connection with proceedings conducted against him in Germany.

"Ultimately, Volodymyr Z. was not detained, because at the beginning of July he left Polish territory, crossing the Polish-Ukrainian border," she wrote in an emailed statement in reply to Reuters's questions.

"Free crossing of the Polish-Ukrainian border by the above-mentioned person was possible because German authorities... did not include him in the database of wanted persons, which meant that the Polish Border Guard had no knowledge and no grounds to detain Volodymyr Z.”

Polish law does not allow for revealing the full name of suspects.

The German prosecutor general's office declined to comment on the media reports. The German interior ministry declined to comment and the justice ministry did not immediately reply to an emailed request for comment.

SUSPECTED ACCOMPLICES

Another man and a woman - also Ukrainian diving instructors - have been identified in Germany's investigation into the sabotage but so far no arrest warrants have been issued for them, according to SZ, Zeit and ARD.

The explosions destroyed three out of four Nord Stream pipelines, which had become a controversial symbol of German reliance on Russian gas in the wake of Moscow's invasion of Ukraine.

Russia blamed the United States, Britain and Ukraine for the blasts, which largely cut Russian gas off from the lucrative European market. Those countries have denied involvement.

Germany, Denmark, and Sweden all opened investigations into the incident, and the Swedes found traces of explosives on several objects recovered from the explosion site, confirming the blasts were deliberate acts.

The Swedish and Danish probes were closed this February without identifying any suspect.

In January 2023, Germany raided a ship that it said may have been used to transport explosives and told the United Nations that it believed trained divers could have attached devices to the pipelines at a depth of about 70 to 80 metres (230-262 ft).

(Reporting by Rachel More and Alexander Ratz in Berlin, and Anna Wlodarczak-Semczuk in Warsaw; Editing by Miranda Murray, Raju Gopalakrishnan and Crispian Balmer)