Military experts suspect sabotage at Andøya

The jammer had been set up at the far northern island in connection with an international exercise. The purpose was to test navigation systems and other equipment in a situation of electromagnetic warfare, newspaper Forsvarets Forum reports.

Representatives from a big number of countries had arrived to the island to take part in the testing.

The jammer was set up on a local mountain top by researchers from the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) before the weekend. When the researchers returned on Sunday, it turned out that the connecting cable had been cut.

“The cable was destroyed. We have indications that this was not an accident but a deliberate action,” says Anders Rødningsby, chief researcher at FFI.

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“These are robust cables and you will have to step pretty hard on them to cut,” he explains.

“We do not know who might have done it. We can not exclude that someone is making a prank. It is more serious if someone has done it on purpose,” Rødningsby says to Forsvarets Forum.

The researcher is concerned that similar situations could be repeated.

“In that case, we have a challenge,” he underlines.

Norway and the other Nordic countries have over the past years increasingly been targeted by saboteurs. Intelligence authorities in the region warn against mounting threats and point their fingers at Russia.

“The current security situation is serious. There is a full-scale invasion war ongoing in Europe. We are standing at a crossroads […],” Minister of Defence Bjørn Arild Gram said in early 2024 as Norway’s three main intelligence agencies presented their annual reports.

A number of cases of suspected sabotage has taken taken place, several of them against underwater infrastructure.

In early 2022, one of the fiberoptic cables that connect the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard with the Norwegian mainland was disrupted following what investigators believe could have been sabotage.

In November 2021, the Norwegian Marine Research Institute informed that its Lofoten–Vesterålen Ocean Observatory was out of service after about 4 km of a 60 km long underwater cable somehow had disappeared.

And in 2023, the Chinese-Russian vessel Newnew Polarbear became key suspect in the disruption of a gas pipeline and two communication cables in the Baltic Sea. The ship soon fled into Russian Arctic waters.