Italian police have arrested a Ukrainian man suspected of co-ordinating attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines, Germany's prosecutor general said on Thursday.
The suspect, identified only as Serhii K. under German privacy laws, was allegedly part of a group that planted devices on the pipelines near the German island of Bornholm, prosecutors said.
He will be brought before a German judge after being transferred.
Serhii and his alleged accomplices had set off from Rostock on Germany's northern coast in a sailing yacht to carry out the attack, prosecutors said. The boat had been rented from a German company with the help of forged identity documents via middlemen, they added.
Explosives were detonated on September 26, 2022, seven months after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, it is alleged, severely damaging the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines – which carry natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea – taking them out of service and deepening Europe's energy crisis.
Seen by both Russia and the West as an act of sabotage, no one has claimed responsibility for the explosions.
Western powers were initially quick to blame Russia, which in turn accused them.
German investigations then pointed to a Ukrainian cell of five men and one woman believed to have chartered the yacht "Andromeda" to carry out the attack, according to Der Spiegel magazine and other media.
Their aim was to destroy the pipelines to prevent Russia from profiting in future from gas sales to Europe. Nord Stream's pipelines had long been controversial for allowing Russian gas to bypass eastern European transit routes and leaving Germany overly reliant on cheap energy from Moscow.
Authorities acted on a European arrest warrant for the suspect, who faces charges of collusion to cause an explosion, anti-constitutional sabotage and destruction of buildings.
Carabinieri officers arrested him overnight in the province of Rimini on Italy's Adriatic coast, the German prosecution office said.
German Justice Minister Stefanie Hubig thanked investigators for what she called a "highly complex operation" leading to the arrest.
The mysterious blasts sent methane levels in the Baltic rocketing to 1,000 times higher than normal. The findings released earlier this year, made with an underwater robot known as a glider, revealed that the gas spread far across the Baltic Sea, with the fallout stretching from the Danish coast to the Polish port of Gdansk.
