Maybe it is planned to be a trilogy?
The BBC has a radio documentary up as a podcast. Available at BBC World Service - The Documentary, Global Perspective, Alert Bay - My Life So Far . Scroll down a little, it was broadcast on 10-01-2009
Thank you. That was a good documentary and contained some interesting information. Here is a direct link to the mp3 file of the documentary.
So, if anybody is still following this, it was a good 22 minute listen and a rehash of the pieces of the story that are known, together with speculation about the feasibility of the floated conspiracy theories. They talked to the British monitoring station of the English channel, and includes the recorded call of the Arctic Sea’s report at the channel.
There are more calls included, for example the sailors’ lawyer, people at shipyards, second hand information of the captain’s description of the men who boarded the ship, the Finnish customs inspector who entered the Arctic Sea prior to it being loaded (though he never entered the cargo hold), some Kaliningrad port official detailing the ships stay there prior to departure, and so on.
Some problems brought up against the S-300 theory were that it would have been very unlikely for complete S-300 vehicles to have been in the cargo hold, as they would not have gone unnoticed when the timber was loaded in Finland. The ship was also inspected in Kaliningrad while empty, though the ship apparently then stayed an extra day before heading off to Finland to pick up the timber cargo.
As an alternative they tried to find out whether the ballast tanks could have been used for fitting the missiles alone. A similar (though not identical ship) was visited, and they concluded that there was enough space in the lower tanks for the 7 meter missiles, but that it would have been very unbelievable that the Russian navy could have offloaded missiles from the ballast tanks to another ship at sea (I don’t know myself how accessible those tanks could be). Also the missiles would have had to be in watertight containers.
An expert in organized crime in Russia, a NY University professor, was interviewed and considered it to be inconceivable that a criminal private enterprise could have managed to divert any S-300 system, as they are very expensive and the primary front line air-defense in Russia. Not something sitting mothballed in some storage. So he says that it could only have been done complicit with the government or some very highly ranked military officers. He does say though that the Israeli theory can’t be ruled out.
The ship had also disappeared from the AIS system for 2 week periods at a time, in a pattern before the alleged hijacking, which the ship owners refused to explain the reason for. Somehow the documentary goes from there to suggest an explanation that the company could have been entangled in a commercial dispute that got out of hand, and that the Russian Navy rode to the rescue. I personally don’t understand how that works out, maybe somebody could explain their thinking?
However, they have no explanation for the silence and secrecy surrounding everything. Even the Maltese authorities refuse to give any comment to them.
To sum up, they cast some doubt over the feasibility of the S-300 theory, but in the end they have no direct answer.
So, basically, something is horribly messed up with the Sea and Sky, probably criminal in nature, and we’re not sure exactly what, but it’s almost certainly there.
Something like that, yes.
Here is an article from today that summarizes the radio documentary quite well:
I appreciate all the follow-ups to this story as time progresses.
2+2 is still not equaling 4 but it sounds like time will be the only factor to fix that…