Filenews 7 October 2025 - by Natasha Christoforou
"It started as a strange topic on an unknown shipping website and quickly grew into a summer mystery," The Guardian wrote in an extensive article about the hijacking of the Arctic Sea cargo ship on September 24, 2009.
Sixteen years later, what happened on the night of July 24, 2009 near the Swedish coast, continues to be characterized by international media as "one of the most mysterious naval incidents of the last decades" and accompanied by conspiracy theories, which refer to a spy thriller. The main theory that circulated spoke of the transfer of a secret cargo of Russian weapons and a connection with intelligence services, a fact denied by the Russians, who seized the ship a month later.
This strange case would remain internationally in the cupboard of history and would be unknown in Cyprus if one of its alleged protagonists was not located in Larnaca. This is Alexei Kratzgur, 47, a Russian-Israeli businessman, who was arrested in the port of Larnaca last Saturday.
The 47-year-old was one of the passengers of a large cruise ship that started from Haifa and stopped in Larnaca for a few hours. The Cypriot Police handcuffed him when it was found that an international arrest warrant issued by Russia through Interpol was pending against him. Yesterday, in fact, the process of extradition to the Russian authorities began before the Larnaca District Court. The court set the next hearing for November 14 and until then he will remain in custody.
The arrest of the wanted man was extensively covered by the media in Israel, with the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reporting that he arrived in Cyprus unaware that an international arrest warrant was pending.
Shadows as to the timing of his arrest were left by his lawyer, Nir Yaslovich, who reportedly stated that "it is very puzzling how the Russian authorities remembered to act only now, after such a long and prolonged delay".
The Russians accuse Kratzgur of being involved in the planning and execution of the piracy of the Arctic Sea.
The Maltese-flagged cargo vessel had departed from the port of Jakobstad in Finland on 23 July 2009 with a cargo of timber and had Algeria as its final destination. On the night of July 24, he was attacked in the Baltic Sea by gunmen, who allegedly pretended to be police officers.
The gunmen were reported to have brutally beaten the 15 members of the Russian crew, tied them up and locked them in cabins. The Russian Navy seized the ship on August 17, 2009, near the Cape Verde Islands in the Atlantic Ocean.
The eight main suspects, mostly from Estonia and Latvia, were arrested and sentenced in 2011 to up to 12 years in prison by a Russian court. They claimed that they were not pirates, but shipwrecked, while at that time major international media left shadows as to the cargo of the ship and the involvement of Russia, which insisted on piracy. It is noted that even after the conviction of the 8, the international media commented that "it never clarified what happened".
Kratzgur was then the owner of an advertising business in Riga and was seen as a person involved in planning the attack, even hiring staff. According to Yedioth Ahronoth, he had been arrested for this case in 2009 as well and released on bail.
