A Croatian investigating judge imposed preventive detention on Thursday on Ukrainian Vladimir Z., who was arrested the day before by the Police in Croatia under an order issued by the German Justice, accusing him of sabotage against the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea in 2022.
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According to Croatian public television HRT, the decision of the judge of the Pula County Court was revealed to the local press by Matija Milos, one of the defense lawyers.
“My client was placed in preventive detention at the request of the state prosecutor, to guarantee his extradition to Germany under the European arrest warrant,” Milos said.
The lawyer added that the defense plans to appeal the measure and pointed out that a Polish court had already previously rejected a German extradition request against the same suspect based on identical facts and legal grounds.
The Croatian Police arrested the suspect last Wednesday in a hotel in the Adriatic city of Pula where, according to several local media, he was staying under a false identity posing as a member of a team filming a movie about the sabotage he is accused of.
According to the German Prosecutor’s Office, the accused, a professional diver, is suspected of having caused, together with other involved parties, an act of sabotage by explosion — a crime against the German Constitution and destruction of infrastructure — having been one of the divers who placed explosive devices in September 2022 on the Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2 pipelines, near the Danish island of Bornholm.
The accused would have directly participated in the dives necessary to carry out the operation.
The detonations, which occurred on September 26, 2022, destroyed three of the four rows of these underwater conduits designed to transport Russian gas to Germany beneath the Baltic Sea, causing serious material damage and interrupting the supply.
