Bombs on the bow?
With 852 dead, the sinking of the "Estonia" was the largest civil shipping disaster in Europe - and possibly one of the greatest crimes in criminal history. A new report provides strong evidence that the ferry was sunk with three explosive devices.
By Helmar Büchel, Clemens Höges, Udo Ludwig and Andreas Ulrich
03/01/2000
It was the night of September 28, 1994: a rabid wind whipped the Baltic Sea, force nine on the Beaufort scale. The ferry "Mariella" carefully fights its way through the up to six meter high breakers in the Baltic Sea.
The officer on watch of the "Mariella" routinely listens to the international call and distress channel, VHF 16. It is 21 minutes past one o'clock in the night, Estonian time, when suddenly a weak voice interrupts the noise on the frequency: "Mayday, Mayday ", calls the Estonian ferry" Estonia ".
After a second emergency call, the officer of another ship asked: "What's going on?" Then the voice from the "Estonia" again: "We have a heavy list, I think 20, 30 degrees." Break. Then the "Estonia" radio gives the position: 59 degrees, 22 minutes north and 21 degrees, 48 minutes east. 50 kilometers away from the nearest coast. Then there is only noise on channel 16. The "Estonia" no longer answers.
The officers of the "Mariella" give full speed to the radar echo of the "Estonia". At 53 minutes past one o'clock they know that they will be late: The "Estonia" disappears from the radar screen.
Shortly after two o'clock the "Mariella" reaches the last position of the "Estonia". From the bridge, the officers can see isolated sea rescue missiles staggering through the darkness like intoxicated birds. Flotsam dances on the waves, empty life jackets in between. In some life rafts, some turned upside down, others half torn, there are people: living and dead mixed up, some naked, many only in underwear or bathrobes. "There were lots of human bodies swimming around in the water, all of them dead," says Johan Larsson, a crew member of a rescue helicopter that arrives after the "Mariella".
"When we arrived," said "Mariella" captain Jan Tore Thörnroos, "many small lights floated on the sea" - the top lights of the inflatable life rafts. "When we went closer, we saw the people floating in the water and heard them screaming for help." One thing, says the Finnish survivor Hannu Seppänen, "you could hear really well, that was the screams of the women somewhere in the water, the screams of the women".
But the tall "Mariella" doesn't dare to get close enough - for fear of running over the drifting people. "The worst thing was when the bodies were sucked into our propellers," says Hemming Eriksson, a passenger on another ferry that is trying to save.
Of the approximately 250 people who were able to jump into the water from the sinking "Estonia", the helpers recover only 138 alive. The others drown, freeze to death in the ten-degree cold water, die of exhaustion or are killed by the breakers on the ship's hull. 852 people perish - most of them go down with the ship, surprised in their sleep, trapped in their cabins, trampled to death in panic. Some may have survived for a few minutes in trapped air bubbles.
The sinking of the "Estonia" was the worst shipping disaster in Europe after the Second World War. It is true that an international commission of inquiry commissioned by the governments of Sweden, Estonia and Finland wanted to end the discussion of the disaster with its final report two years ago.
But the report is full of omissions and inconsistencies, for which there are only two explanations: Either the Commission slouched considerably - or it did not want to know too precisely.
There are some arguments in favor of the cover-up theory: A central piece of evidence has been removed. And the underwater videos of the wreck, which is now between 58 and 85 meters deep, have been partially deleted.
Above all: To this day, the three countries prohibit their nationals from a new diving expedition by law. If someone else cruises at the scene of the accident for a long time, he will be pushed away or hindered by Swedish ships - as if the Swedes had something to hide.
Members of the commission insist on their version: The bow visor of the "Estonia", which forms the tip of the ship as a kind of breakwater in front of the loading ramp, was then designed too weakly. It was torn down, the ferry was full and sunk. The Meyer shipyard in Papenburg, Emsland, which built the ship, is to blame for the disaster. End the debate.
Are you kidding me? Are you serious when you say that. It should only really begin now: Last Thursday, the expert group in Sweden, hired by Meyer Werft, presented a more than 1,300-page report, with all attachments and special reports together, eleven files. On behalf of the shipyard, the German group of experts, headed by Hamburg lawyer Peter Holtappels, 64, and average expert Werner Hummel, 60, worked on this expertise for five years.
The team's conclusions are dramatic: on storm night there may have been a terrorist attack on the "Estonia". According to the report of a renowned explosives expert, three bombs exploded on the ship. In addition, the ship had been poorly maintained, which contributed to the disaster.
If the Hamburg experts are right - and they present plenty of evidence - this would be one of the greatest crimes in criminal history. And even worse: there are indications that the Swedish authorities could have expected a bomb attack on the ship - and still did not stop it.
About half a year before the disaster there was an extremely complex bomb alarm exercise on the "Estonia". The details of the major action on February 2, 1994 can be found in the files of the Stockholm Public Prosecutor's Office. There is, among other things, a paper entitled "Background to the scenario". "The shipping company Estline," it says, "has received bomb threats on a regular basis for a long time. All bomb threats were addressed by telephone to the shipping company in Stockholm."
“On February 2nd at 6 p.m.,” the paper continues, “the shipping company received a telephone bomb threat against the MS“ Estonia. ”This bomb threat came from a man who reported in bad Swedish that there were a number of bomb loads aboard the '' Estonia ''. They would detonate if he did not get a large sum of money. "
According to the scenario, the shipping company in Stockholm "immediately contacts the commander on board the '' Estonia ''". Afterwards "one decides in consultation with the commanding officer on board to send search dogs on board the '' Estonia" ".
The exercise can begin. According to the log of the operation, the fire teams of the "Estonia" are alerted by the password "Mr. Skylight".
A helicopter, one of several on this mission, lands on the "Estonia". Four police officers and two explosives search dogs jump on deck. "Very easily," according to the protocol, the dogs find a few grams of TNT that had been hidden on the car deck. Another charge, this completely fictitious, detonates according to the exercise plan. The rescue operation, according to the protocol, "went well".
Lennart Alberg from the Swedish Maritime Administration was one of the leaders of the exercise. It was already the second mission on the "Estonia", he says. The first exercise took place just a few days earlier, on January 25th. The background paper was of course a scenario, pure fiction, devised by a police officer.
However, there was a realistic background for this. At the end of 1993, Alberg says, a Swedish shipping company was blackmailed. Therefore, his authority has tightened the security precautions. The blackmailer was later caught.
Really all just fiction on the "Estonia"? Shortly before the ship actually went down, according to several survivors, the announcement suddenly came over the public address system: "Mr. Skylight, number one and number two" - the command for a fire alarm, for example. And Anders Wehtje, who worked in the Estline office in Stockholm until the end of 1999, admitted to SPIEGEL TV that at that time there might actually have been "two or three bomb threats" against his shipping company. But that is quite normal, "every ferry line gets something like this".
Shipping companies deal with the risk very differently. Wilhelm Teichert, for example, safety officer of the Förde Reederei Seetouristik in Flensburg, whose passenger ships operate across Europe, only remembers one bomb search on one of his ships. For Captain Günther Kullack from DFDS Seaways, however, bombing exercises at sea are not at all unusual: "We do something like that regularly."
But if the "Estonia" was actually sunk by a blackmailer bomb, there must be traces - and clear ones.
A year ago, the experts from Meyer Werft took a very close look at all the underwater videos of the wreck. On behalf of the government commission, experts had filmed the ship on three expeditions. Robots went down twice, and once more divers from the Norwegian specialist company Rockwater. The commission has released over 40 hours of material.
On one of the tapes, Hummel suddenly discovered a detail that he had previously missed: an orange parcel about the size of a cigar box.
Hummel stopped short. This wasn't part of the ship, clearly a foreign body to him. The expert now slowly looked at the recordings from the other side of the bow again. Difficult, because the quality of the tapes is often lousy, for long stretches nothing but patterns, gray on gray.
So he got no further, everything remained far too vague for him. Hummel had all tapes analyzed by a British video expert, his son-in-law Jonathan Bisson. He immediately determined that the official material had been manipulated and was by no means complete. Bisson sorted what the commission had approved and broken it down into still images, 25 per second of film (see page 66).
The German commission sent tapes and still videos to Brian Braidwood. In the world, hardly anyone knows more about explosive attacks on ships than the former Lieutenant-Commander of the British Navy.
He served in the Navy for 34 years, 25 of which as an explosives expert, in various command posts. As chief of the mine diving command in the Far East, he was responsible for all explosives operations east of Suez. Braidwood blew up reefs, cleared bombs and later trained seafarers and divers in counter-terrorism as the head of a special naval school. For the last 13 years in uniform he developed new defense techniques against bomb attacks for the Navy and dealt with almost all weapons with which ships can be blown up.
Today, the retired officer is called in as a civilian expert in the event of accidents, for example from insurance companies. When French agents sank the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" off New Zealand in 1985, the government in Wellington asked Braidwood for help.
A BOMB ATTENTAT?
After Bisson's preparatory work, Braidwood analyzed the still images and underwater videos from the ominous package on the "Estonia". It hung right next to the bow ramp, not far from the hydraulic locks on the visor. The poor quality of the still images made difficulties for the expert, and the unfavorable perspective of the camera made the work difficult.
Even so, Braidwood concluded that there was a high probability that the package was a non-detonated device. The object, "no longer than 200 millimeters and no shorter than 100 millimeters", looks like a hand-packed load of plastic explosives - as strong as one to two kilograms of the classic explosives TNT. Enough to tear up the ten millimeter thick hull.
Martin Volk, former bomb defuser for the Berlin State Criminal Police Office, comes to the same conclusion. "It's probably plastic explosives," he says when asked by Hummel. The material is "highly explosive". In the former Eastern Bloc, mafia gangs can easily get hold of this material - as well as simple time detonators and magnetic plates as a holder.
Most of all, Volk is wondering why the question had not been investigated long ago: "From a small piece of metal in the immediate vicinity of the alleged explosion it could easily be determined whether explosives were used." Admittedly, the government commission was unable to detect any signs of explosions on the salvaged bow visor, which is located in a Swedish military base.
On the other hand, Braidwood found a lot more: three holes - all in the vicinity of the movable bow ramp and its vulnerable mechanics (see graphic on page 70).
Even Braidwood almost missed the first hole on the underwater videos. The diver had the camera attached to his helmet and quickly panned over the spot. But played in slow motion, it was clearly visible - a fairly round hole, about 30 centimeters in diameter and about the same height above the floor of the car deck in the steel wall. Braidwood believes the bomb might have been on something there.
"The hole is surrounded by prongs of torn metal that have been bent in all directions away from the center of the hole," said the bomb expert. His conclusion: "These points taken together suggest that a small explosion occurred on the side of the bulkhead, with the center of the explosion in the center of the hole." Damage of this kind is typical for bombs with an explosive force of around one to two kilograms of TNT.
The explosive charge would likely have ripped a larger hole if it hadn't already spilled water on the car deck, Braidwood said. That dampened the explosion: "Like all liquids, water is incompressible."
As Braidwood watched more videos, he discovered two even more devastating holes - again close to the bow ramp and visor, but this time on the opposite right side, to starboard.
The first of these two holes is about three feet below deck 3. The sharp steel spikes are "of the curved shape that appear when there is damage from an explosion". The massive steel edges are "bent in a way that can hardly come from any mechanical impact". Braidwood also believes he can see traces of smoke.
The specialist formulated his conclusion about this hole harshly: "The damage to the starboard locks of the visor was caused by an explosion. The charge was between one and two kilograms equivalent TNT. The explosive charge was placed on the forward bulkhead, directly above the lever for the manual side lock. The bomb could easily have been placed by someone following the route taken by a crew member responsible for the side lock. " The explosive device bent the heavy steel hook for manually securing the visor like thin sheet metal.
Expert Hummel therefore considers this Braidwood finding to be the most serious: The explosion pushed the bow visor forward and thus "broke the already damaged starboard hinge on the deck". The bow visor was barely held in place and thus sealed the fate of the "Estonia" (see graphic on page 69).
The second of the holes on the starboard side is probably the largest. In order to analyze it, Braidwood had to assemble several images. "The composite picture," he noted, gives "dramatic clarity an impression of the damage." Here, too, an explosive device had detonated, as indicated by the peculiarly bent metal edges around the hole.
According to Braidwood's measurement, the hole is eight feet long, from top to bottom. The explosion blew up whole pieces of metal from the bulkhead and tore the hydraulics apart. The steel girders of the twelve-tonne bow ramp are bent like the sheet metal of a discarded Coke can.
HUMMEL'S RESEARCH
In August Braidwood sent his results to Hamburg, a 120-page report. But Holtappels and Hummel had not only called on the specialists Braidwood and Bisson: as early as February 1995 they gathered a whole team of experts around them, including scientists from the Technical University and the Bundeswehr University in Hamburg. Of course, the troops are biased, after all, the shipyard has to fear claims for damages worth millions if they are to blame.
The Hamburg team interviewed witnesses in Sweden, Finland, England and the Baltic States. The experts carried out their own scientific experiments and produced models of the most important parts of the ship. "The real reason for the downfall should be covered up," Hummel suspected even before he had the Braidwood expertise in his hands. After research by his team and further statements from survivors, a version of the last "Estonia" trip can be reconstructed, which contradicts the official commission report on almost all important points.
Tallinn, Estonia, September 27, 1994: In the harbor lies the showpiece, the pride of the young state, the blue and white "Estonia" - not an old Soviet pot, but West German workmanship. The diesels are already running, the ship is filled with 40 trucks, 34 cars, 803 passengers and 186 crew members.
The Swedish truck driver Carl Övberg, 48, almost missed the ferry to Stockholm. Soldiers, he says, have cordoned off the "Estonia" pier. Two Scania trucks drive into the ship via the bow ramp. They will be added later on the freight list. What they had loaded so important that the army had to take care of it is still unclear - one of the many "Estonia" puzzles.
Dock workers cast off the lines at 7.15 p.m. - 15 minutes after the scheduled departure time, but nobody cares about the delay. Captain Arvo Andresson, 40, is considered a daring skipper. He often beats the 24,000 hp diesel engines so brutally that the "Estonia" rarely reaches its destination too late. "Regardless of the wind and weather," says Övberg, "the ship always arrived in Stockholm on time."
No passenger notices that the "Estonia" is sailing slightly to starboard. Hummel will later find out that water penetrates through rust holes before departure - and so the ferry is already battered towards its demise.
The officers think nothing of it. Such a huge ship, a good 155 meters long and ten decks high, can withstand minor leaks. Meyer Werft also has a good reputation, after all, the family company has been building ships since 1795.
In 1980 the ferry was launched. At the time she was one of the largest and most modern Baltic Sea ships of this type with her 15,566 gross register tons, designed for 2000 passengers and 460 cars. She was delivered to the Finnish shipping company Sally and initially served as "Viking Sally". After that the ship changed owner and name several times, sometimes it was called "Silja Star", sometimes "Wasa King".
In January 1993 the Estline Marine Company took over the ship. The company is a joint venture between the Swedish shipping company Nordström & Thulin and the Estonian state shipping company. For financial reasons, the owners registered their company in Cyprus. Before it went down, the ferry had traveled 20,500 hours, mostly between Turku, Tallinn and Stockholm.
The "Estonia" was equally popular with Swedish travelers, day trippers and traders. There was a tax-free shop, casino, and restaurants served decent food. From the beginning of the nineties, the Estonians also made use of their freshly won freedom to travel; traders with louder and less louder intentions benefited from the less controlled sea route.
Initially, the "Estonia" made good progress on its last voyage. But the weather forecasts sound bleak. The Swedish Meteorological Institute expects wind forces between seven and eight on the Beaufort scale, plus waves five and a half meters high. That is a lot for the Baltic Sea. Captain Andresson is not impressed when the wind picks up. He continues to steer through the sea at 19 knots, almost full speed.
At around 11 p.m., truck driver Övberg was finally assigned a cabin, number 1049 on deck 1 - below the waterline. Some tourists would suffer from claustrophobia there. But that's not what irritates Övberg today. He has already driven the "Estonia" several dozen times: "Everything was different that day. The team seemed very nervous and aggressive to me."
At some point that night the "Estonia" overtook the ferry "Mariella" because it was carefully fighting its way through the storm with throttled engines. Many "Estonia" guests have now taken their seats in the dance restaurant. But this time the pleasure only lasts for a short time: a dancer staggers into the drums twice in a row. Even the professionals on board recognize that they have to keep both feet on the ground in the rough sea.
When the musicians finally pack their instruments around midnight, many passengers tumble into bed. Most of them will have to pay for that with their lives. Only the die-hard night owls go to the "Pub Admiral" for a beer.
The Polish freighter "Amber" passed the "Estonia" at around 11:15 pm. The guard on duty wonders how hard the "Estonia" rushes through the night: "Those responsible on the bridge must be crazy, absolutely incompetent."
Below, deep in the hull of the ship, the truck driver Övberg realizes early on that there is an impending danger. "Suddenly I heard a bang, the whole ship vibrated," he recalls, "as if two objects had collided."
THE DOWNFALL
It is shortly before one o'clock in the night, board time, and the German pharmacist Manfred Rothe, 44, is up in the pub Admiral "hears a loud bang, almost thunder". It seems to him as if "iron hit iron". The first blow shakes the whole ship. A second follows shortly afterwards. It is as if the "Estonia" has stopped. She turns to the left, and immediately heels sharply to the right. All four machines stop; this happens automatically from an incline of 30 degrees.
Bottles and glasses tip off the shelves in the pub. A man jumps up and runs towards the exit. Everyone is running after them. In the cabins, passengers fall from their bunks.
The agricultural machinery mechanic Siegfried Wolf from Espelkamp is on his way to his bunk and passes the shopping line. When the "Estonia" lies on its side, the contents of entire walls of shelves fall to the floor. Panic breaks out. Someone is thrown against a pillar. He remains lying unconscious. Wolf only has one thought, he says: "Get out of here, get out quickly, up."
At the second bang, Övberg also fled: "I just got dressed and then ran out of my cabin." Several passengers hear detonations at the same time. Some hear only one, some two, some want to have heard three.
Bomb expert Braidwood believes that the explosive devices will explode at that moment. The ailing starboard hinge breaks. The hydraulic cylinder on the port side pierced the deck as if the "Estonia" were a sardine can. The so-called Atlantic lock, which holds the lower edge of the bow visor on the ship, gives way. The visor tips over - and crashes onto the tip of the bow ramp.
Övberg runs to the stairs, which are already dangerously sloping: "When I turned around, I saw water splash under the doors and from below from the ventilation pipes." He has only one goal: "Get out!" He makes it to deck 7, outside. Past falling and screaming people.
No law says: women and children first. Most of the survivors will be sturdy men between 20 and 40. A striking number of crew members, 43 in total, make it. Many of them wore life jackets early on - an indication that they were warned in good time?
The ship straightens up a bit, then it leans more and more. "If I hadn't known my way around so well," says Övberg today, "then I would never have made it."
When the German pharmacist Rothe also reached deck 7 shortly after one o'clock, he saw a crew member tampering with a box. Life jackets are stowed there. Little by little, more refugees are pushing outside. Rothe throws them west. Soon around 200 people will freeze in the wind. And because the ship is leaning further and further to starboard, the first ones climb over the railing. They now find a better grip on the trunk.
You are far from being saved. The lifeboats are jammed in their davits. And of the life rafts - rubber rafts that inflate automatically - most are broken or turned upside down by the storm. Some of them panic and slide down their hulls into the water and tear their backs on steel parts. Believers pray.
Wolf and Rothe discover a life raft that has inflated on the now almost horizontal hull. But when they seal closer, they see that it is already overcrowded.
The pharmacist Rothe clings to the outer wall of the island and in the next instant is thrown into the raging sea by a heavy gust of raft. It tears the lifeline of the island out of his hands, he is now floating alone in the water. Again and again the heavy crushers push it under the surface.
But Rothe is a trained lifeguard. He tells himself that he still has a chance. Finally he gets hold of a suitcase. He hears the ship giving one last sign of life. The captain lets the foghorn howl into the night again.
The moonlight shines pale on the water, and for a brief moment it seems to Rothe as if the sea has become calm - probably because he is lying in the slipstream of the ship. The "Estonia" sinks, stern first.
In expert circles, the tall and therefore wobbly roll-on roll-off ferries with their entrances and exits at the bow and stern have long been considered endangered. Since the sinking of the British canal ferry "Herald of Free Enterprise" in 1987 (193 dead) and that of the Polish "Jan Heweliusz" in 1993 (55 dead), the so-called RoRo technology has been controversial. A rapid ingress of water, whatever, could put the pots with their vehicle decks as large as underground garages "on their backs like a turtle," explains Ian Dand from the shipbuilding research institute British Maritime Technology.
Since the sinking of the "Titanic", international maritime law has required the installation of so-called bulkheads, watertight partition walls that pull the ship through from the keel to above the waterline. In this way, water flowing through a leak can only flood part of it - in theory. The "Titanic" also had bulkheads and was considered unsinkable. But the saving walls were too low - similar to the "Estonia".
The shipyards pull in a high bulkhead between the ramp and the hold on ro-ro ferries going out at sea. But it hinders fast loading and unloading. That is why shipping companies like to do without it. Because the "Estonia" was only built for coastal travel - she should not cross more than 20 nautical miles from land - she was approved without a bulkhead behind the bow visor. For this, the ramp behind the visor should be waterproof.
BUMPER ON THE "ESTONIA"
Even the Finnish owners ignored the annoying restriction of their sea route. And in Estonia, the maritime authority had delegated its control obligation to the French classification society "Bureau Veritas" due to a lack of staff. According to the German experts, this gave the "Estonia" permission for long voyages - a fatal mistake.
The government commission believes, however, that the "Estonia" otherwise left Tallinn in a properly seaworthy condition. Wrong, say the Hamburg experts. Their research showed that at the latest since the sale of the ship to the Estline, the ramp and front visor had not been properly maintained. Witnesses, for example, reported negligently executed welds on important mountings. Rain Oolmets, a former crew member of the "Estonia", said he had to cover up the botch with a lot of paint. The tip of the ship, where, according to the Braidwood report, the explosives exploded, must have been worn out and ailing for a long time.
According to eyewitnesses, the water often stood two and a half meters high between the visor and the ramp. The captain of a pilot boat claims to have observed a few days before the sinking how streams of water shot out of the visor whenever the "Estonia" rose from the waves.
The Swedish pilot Bo Söderman told Hummels researchers that he had seen the water sloshing back and forth ten centimeters high on the entire car deck on an earlier voyage - a load weighing tons that would destabilize any ship.
The Hummel troop also compiled statements from passengers who reported that the crew had repeatedly worked on the bow with a cutting torch and sledgehammer because the visor could no longer be opened and closed properly.
The history of the so-called Atlantic Lock sounds even more alarming. It mainly consists of a thick bolt that fixes the bottom of the bow visor to the ship's hull. The former "Estonia" boatman Juhani Luttunen says this lock no longer worked properly. After his colleague Christer Koivisto got down to it with a hammer and cutting torch, it had become largely unusable. The Swedish manufacturing company then repaired all of the parts - and forbade the crew to fumble with them again.
Koiviston is said not to have adhered to this verdict. Apparently, Luttunen therefore blames his colleague for the downfall. On June 12, 1996, almost two years after the "Estonia" sank, he shot his old friend in the head. Luttunen goes to psychiatry for the murder.
Various testimonies give the Hamburg experts a scenario that could explain the strange noises that passengers on deck 1 heard shortly before the detonations: According to Hummel, water pours out of the visor through the warped bow ramp onto the car deck at the start of the journey. The crew opens the tailgate a little to drain the water. That might hasten the downfall later. In addition, the men try to stop the leaks at the front with mattresses and blankets - a theory that is dismissed as nonsense by commission members to this day. But on the video still images, mattresses on the bow ramp can be clearly seen.
Despite the heavy seas, the captain remains at his high speed. Around 0.30 a.m., according to the German experts, the sailor Silver Linde informed the bridge about the chaos below. The officer on watch then dispatched some crew members to try to close the bow with hammer and hydraulics. According to Braidwood's theory, they died immediately when the explosives detonated. The water flows through the open bow and capsizes the ferry.
But Hummel has still not solved one riddle: "There must be another hole below the waterline."
Dracos Vassalos, Ro-Ro expert in the Department of Ship and Marine Technology at the University of Strat hclyde in Glasgow, fed the available data into his computer and kept the "Estonia" overturning on the screen. Result: Everything fit, and still - it didn't work that way. Why, asked Hummel after the Vassalos analysis, can the overturned "Estonia" have disappeared almost immediately like a stone in the sea? "If such a ferry gets water on the car deck," says the accident specialist, "it tips over and drifts for days on end" - unless there is another hole in the bottom of the hull through which the air can escape when the water hits flows in.
Hummel found evidence of his suspicion on the videos. Next to the wreck of the "Estonia" he saw parts of truckloads on the seabed. The openings on the bow and stern ramps are too small for such large items of cargo, such as the pallets. The statements of the truck driver Övberg also confirmed the theory, as he saw water flowing in from below on his deck - under the vehicles.
But the commission of inquiry set up by the Prime Ministers of Sweden, Finland and Estonia does not seem to want to know exactly. She had already finished her version on October 3rd, five days after the sinking: "We now know what happened", it was said at the time, "we just have to investigate how it came about."
Admittedly, not all commission experts believed in the theory, which almost all of Meyer Werft was to blame. Quarrel broke out again and again, some members threw down. When the Commission presented the official 200-page report in December 1997, experts immediately found the first errors. The head of the Meteorological Institute in Stockholm said, for example, that the information about the weather situation was incorrect. A bereaved lawyer spoke of "systematic deception and blackout".
The principle is quite simple, says the German survivor Rothe: "There are three parties sitting at a table and shoving the buck to anyone who is not there" - the shipyard in Germany. Because all three countries have weak spots: the Swedes, who should have controlled the ship more closely; the Estonians, who owned part of the ship; the Finns, who were accused of errors in the rescue operation.
Cover-up on a grand scale
Soon there are indications from which relatives of victims conclude that the commission was trying to cover up something in order to absolve the three countries of all guilt. had been obliged, had also lifted the bolt of the Atlantic lock - a central detail, as the lock was, according to the commission, designed too weakly by Meyer Werft and therefore failed. But hardly recovered, the representative of the official commission, Börje Stenström, took the piece of steel - and threw it back into the water. Reason: The bolt was too heavy and no longer fit in the helicopter.
After that, the Swedish government dared what critics consider to be one of the most expensive cover-ups in history. The plan was for the wreck to disappear under a massive concrete cover for all eternity, similar to the Chernobyl disaster reactor. Official reason: Nobody should disturb the peace of the dead. The Finnish "Estonia" investigator Kari Lehtola admits: "Normal divers cannot work at this depth, over 60 meters. Even the Finnish Navy cannot."
The Swedish government wanted to have the action cost 65 million marks, and it was in a strange hurry. Even before the plan was approved in Stockholm, ships carted tons of rubble and rubble and tipped them over the "Estonia". Only massive protests by Swedish citizens and relatives stopped the maneuver.
After all, the three commission countries achieve one thing: they seal off "Estonia" with a ban miles law. Since July 1, 1995, every citizen from Sweden, Finland and Estonia has even risked imprisonment if they approach the scene of the accident too boldly.
Critics wonder. Countries like the United States do a lot to solve disasters. In an operation costing several million marks, one of the most modern special ships in the world is currently trying to recover rubble and victims of the EgyptAir crash off the American east coast. Only in the case of "Estonia", the governments involved want to make everything forgotten as quickly as possible.
With all the secrecy, it is not surprising that all kinds of speculation will soon flourish. In 1995 an alleged secret dossier from former agents of the Russian secret service KGB emerges. The "Felix Report", so named after the founder of the later KGB, Felix Dzerzhinsky, contains numerous reports on crimes in the former Soviet Union as well as several pages on the sinking of the "Estonia". A drug lord smuggled large quantities of heroin and 40 tons of cobalt onto the ship in two trucks. The authorities had learned of the planned deal that an assistant to the drug dealer ("Jurij") then forced Captain Andresson to throw the cargo overboard. Therefore the visor was opened. "Unqualified shit talk"calls the former commissioner Olof Forssberg something like that.
According to the Felix report, the Estonian customs officer Igor Krishtapovich is said to have overheard the radio telephone call between Jurij and Andresson. There is no evidence of this. Only one thing has been proven: three weeks after the ferry went down, Krishtapovich was shot dead by strangers in Tallinn.
Another conspiracy theory sounds even more daring: Western intelligence agents had obtained high-tech weapons from Russia and brought those out of the country with the "Estonia". To stop the hustle and bustle, Russian agents blew up the ship.
Of all the daring stories, the most plausible is the version according to which the Estline could have been blackmailed and the "Estonia" was sunk because the shipping company did not pay.
Swedes and Estonians are still concerned with one more inconsistency: shortly after the disaster, eight crew members were reported as rescued on the official government lists. Witnesses also claim to have seen the second captain, the chief engineer and two dancers. Only later were they pronounced dead. Wild rumors emerge that they are still alive somewhere today.
No wonder that the relatives of victims and survivors still want to know how the disaster really came about. The so-called SEA organization, in which around half of all Swedish relatives are organized, wants to rescue the dead and have the investigation rolled out again. "There are still many approaches," believes SEA spokesman Lennart Berglund.
At the beginning of 1999 the so-called Independent Facts Group was founded, also in Sweden. The family organization consists of the management consultant Björn Stenberg, the engineer Johan Ridderstolpe and, according to Stenberg, five other members. Like Hummel, the troops believe that there is a large hole in the hull.
"We want to know the real facts," says Stenberg, who lost a brother on the "Estonia": "Whatever caused the accident, it has to be found out so that something like this never happens again."
https://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-15348746.html
