The United States has questions to answer over its alleged role in explosions that destroyed the undersea Nord Stream gas pipelines last year, Russia’s foreign ministry says.
It was commenting on a blog post published earlier on Wednesday by respected American journalist Seymour Hersh that accused the US military of involvement in the blasts and alleged President Joe Biden green-lighted the operation.
Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova called on the White House to address the “facts” presented by Hersh.
Quoting one unnamed source with “direct knowledge of the operational planning”, Hersh detailed how “skilled deep-water divers” from the US Navy planted C-4 explosives during a training exercise last June, then detonated the payload remotely three months later.
“President Joseph Biden saw the pipelines as a vehicle for [Russian President] Vladimir Putin to weaponise natural gas for his political and territorial ambitions,” Hersh wrote.
Hersh is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist who exposed the 1969 massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American forces. He also broke the story of US troops brutalising Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib after the US invasion in 2003.
Russia, without providing evidence, has repeatedly said NATO nations were behind last September’s explosions affecting the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines – multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects that carried Russian gas to Germany under the Baltic Sea. Western officials have denied those accusations.
Source: aljazeera.com
