Report: Chemical weapons dumped in Baltic Sea during 1990s

Feb 4, 2010, 13:16 GMT

Stockholm - Swedish politicians Thursday called for a probe into reports that chemical weapons and radioactive waste from a former Soviet military base were dumped in the Baltic Sea.

Broadcaster SVT Wednesday screened a documentary where a Swedish military intelligence agent said the dumping took place near the Swedish island of Gotland between 1989 and 1992.

'It was taken out at night and dumped at two sites,' Donald Forsberg told SVT.

The waste was said to originate from a Soviet military base in Latvia, which was evacuated after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s.

Swedish military intelligence in 1999 and 2000 compiled three highly classified reports about the alleged dumping in what is now Sweden's economic zone but apparently no follow-up was made, the documentary alleged.

Foreign Minister Carl Bildt said he had not seen the documentary and had no comment about its accuracy.

'We have to find out what sort of information the former government received. Obviously their assessment was that they did not need to act on this information,' Bildt told Swedish radio news.

Bildt said he planned to contact among others Jan Eliasson, who was state secretary for foreign affairs at the time.

Eliasson, who later served as foreign minister, said he also backed declassifying the reports.

Rolf K Nilsson, member of parliament for Gotland for the conservatives, earlier said it was important to locate and analyze the content in the containers, adding this was not just a Swedish interest since sea currents could disperse the waste.

Nilsson, a member of the defence committee, said he was tipped off about the dumping a year ago but his enquiries had been without result.

Former defence minister Bjorn von Sydow told Swedish radio news he had no recollection about being informed about the dumping but supported a probe.

A former policy advisor to the late foreign minister Anna Lindh said Lindh had demanded more information when told of the incident.

The defence ministry at the time said that more detailed information was needed about the possible sites, otherwise a search would be too costly and likely fruitless, Lindh's aide Sven Olof Pettersson said.

Uppdrag Granskning said the alleged dumping sites were not near the location for a planned underwater pipeline, known as Nord Stream, aimed at transporting natural gas from Russia to Germany under the Baltic Sea.

Critics of the Nord Stream project have cited the risk of disturbing chemical munitions dumps from the two world wars. The consortium has said it was to make sure it avoided such areas.