
The Helsinki District Court sentenced the captain and a senior crew member of the cargo ship Fitburg for aggravated criminal damage.
AI-generated summary
The Fitburg was seized on December 31 following damage to cables connecting Helsinki and Tallinn. Authorities alleged the ship dragged its anchor for hours.
A Finnish court on Thursday convicted the Russian captain and a senior crew member of the cargo ship Fitburg for damaging two undersea telecommunications cables in the Gulf of Finland last year.
The Helsinki District Court found the two defendants guilty of "aggravated criminal damage."
The captain was sentenced to three and a half years in jail, according to the AFP news agency. The crew member, an Azerbaijani citizen, was sentenced to two years and 10 months.
The defendants denied any wrongdoing and have questioned Finland's jurisdiction in the case.
What else do we know about the Fitburg freighter?
Finnish authorities seized the vessel on December 31 on suspicion that it had damaged cables linking Finland's capital, Helsinki, and Tallinn, Estonia.
Finnish police at the time said the ship had been dragging its anchor for hours when it was discovered.
The Fitburg and its 14-member crew had been en route to the port of Haifa, Israel, from the Russian city of St. Petersburg when the incident occurred.

Federal prosecutors dropped all criminal charges against Kseniia Petrova, a Russian scientist at Harvard Medical School, after she spent four months in immigration detention following her arrest at Boston's Logan Airport for carrying frog embryos intended for cancer research.

New Jersey's new e-bike licensing and registration law has caused widespread confusion, administrative hurdles, and severe drops in bike shop sales, leading lawmakers to propose rollbacks.

The Australian government defended its under-16 social media ban in court against a legal challenge by Reddit and the Digital Freedom Project, which argue the law infringes constitutional freedom of political communication.

Massachusetts mother Lindsay Clancy, who killed her three children in 2023, is seeking to dismiss murder charges on double jeopardy grounds. Her defense argues the judge mishandled jury deliberations, while prosecutors maintain the mistrial does not bar a retrial.

Australian human rights lawyer Eva Buzo completed an 11-hour swim in Montego Bay to support Jamaican activists fighting against beach privatization and colonial-era coastal access laws.

The Wikimedia Foundation has filed an amicus brief in the copyright lawsuit between The New York Times, OpenAI, and Microsoft. The foundation argues for a balanced fair use interpretation that protects both technological innovation and the availability of knowledge.