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The Arctic Sea - Source: Reuters -
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Russia's top general said on Thursday the military would search the Arctic Sea for any possible secret cargo when it returned to Russia from a maritime odyssey that made headlines round the world .
Russia says the Maltese-registered Arctic Sea, officially carrying timber from Finland to Algeria, was hijacked by eight men off the coast of Sweden on July 24.
Russian warships found the ship in the Atlantic off the Cape Verde islands on Aug. 17.
"We want to make sure that there is nothing but timber on board this ship. The motive for the seizure is simply not very clear," Nikolai Makarov, chief of Russia's general staff, told reporters during an official visit to Mongolia.
"We only know it is (carrying) timber, but what else it is actually transporting has yet to be clarified," said Makarov.
The saga of the Arctic Sea sparked concern across Europe after media reported the ship might have been smuggling arms or even nuclear material to the Middle East.
Contact with the 97-metre, 4,000 dwt ship was lost after it sailed through the English Channel in late July, though maritime authorities said later that several nations were tracking it as it made its way towards Cape Verde.
Russia has released little information about the ship and the eight men - citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Russia - suspected of hijacking it are in Moscow's high security Lefortovo prison.
The men, who face charges that could keep them in jail for 20 years, have denied hijacking the Arctic Sea and say they went aboard the ship after running out of fuel. Russian investigators have also questioned the crew of the ship.
Pirate saga
Piracy is extremely rare in well-policed northern European waters and maritime experts have asked why anyone would risk seizing an elderly ship carrying $US2 million worth of timber and then sail for Africa.
"We do not rule out the possibility that they might have been carrying not only timber," Alexander Bastrykin, head of the the prosecutor-general's main investigations unit, said in an interview with the Rossiiskaya Gazeta published on Wednesday.
"This is why we need to examine the vessel; so that there are no dark spots in this story," he said. "This is why we asked the crew members to stay on in Moscow; we also have to clarify whether any one of them may be involved in these events."
A spokesman for the prosecutor-general's investigations unit said later that speculation about "a secret mission" was untrue and that there was no evidence of any "forbidden cargo".
The ship, built in 1991, underwent repairs in the Russian port of Kaliningrad just before the voyage.
Four members of the crew were left aboard the ship in Cape Verde to sail it back to Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiysk. Makarov said the vessel was likely to arrive in the first half of September.
