The Russian captain of the hijacked cargo ship Arctic Sea tried to pass his ship off as North Korean when met by a Russian warship searching for it near Cape Verde, Russia's foreign ministry said Tuesday.
When the ship was intercepted on August 17, "the Arctic Sea's captain suddenly declared that the ship was North Korean", the ministry said in a statement.
Moscow then appealed to Pyongyang for verification as the captain claimed his ship was North Korea's cargo Chendin-2, "heading from Havana to Sierra Leone with a cargo of palm tree wood," the ministry said.
"The North Korean side clarified the situation and told us that at the moment the suspect ship was intercepted, the aforementioned North Korean ship could not be found at those coordinates as it was in an Angolan port," the ministry said.
"The preliminary search of the ship showed up no suspect cargo," the Russian ministry said, adding that "a more detailed search will be held in one of the ports on the Arctic Sea's route" to Russia's Black Sea port of Novorossiisk.
The chief of Russia's prosecutor general's investigative committee, Alexander Bastrykin, would not rule out that the ship's crew, all Russians, may have been involved in the ship's disappearance.
"We do not rule out the possibility that the Arctic Sea transported something else than wood," Bastrykin said in an interview due to be published in the Rossiyskaya Gazeta daily on Wednesday.
"This is why we detained the crew, as we must figure out if any one of them was involved in those events," he added.
Intense speculation has been raging since the 4,000-tonne ship vanished after setting sail from Finland on July 23, bound for Algeria with a cargo of timber worth 1.2 million euros (1.8 million dollars).
Shipping experts have raised numerous questions about the ship's disappearance, most notably over why it took Russia so long to confirm its recapture and whether its cargo was really timber or something more sinister.
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