A Greek-flagged tanker was spotted loitering around the site of the Nord Stream attacks for six days in September 2022, two weeks before the pipelines were blown up in a sabotage attack, a Denmark-based open-source intelligence (OSINT) analyst has discovered. Trawling through data from the Automatic Identification System, a database showing the locations of ships operating across the world’s seas and oceans, analyst Oliver Alexander found that the Minerva Julie, a 183-meter-long, 32-meter-wide Greek-flagged oil and chemical tanker, stopped and then idled in an area of the Baltic Sea off the Danish island of Bornholm from September 6-13, before pressing east to Tallinn, Estonia, and then to St. Petersburg, Russia.

Alexander detailed the discovery in a Twitter thread in which he expressed skepticism about the New York Times report blaming a “pro-Ukrainian group” for sabotaging the pipelines. “Unfortunately, the new New York Times article doesn’t give any new actionable information that can be examined,” he wrote, suggesting that there wasn’t any “real substance in the article that brings us measurably closer to knowing the truth about what happened” because the entire story was based on claims by anonymous officials and intelligence sources.

Minerva Julie’s owners, Minerva Maritime, confirmed the oil tanker’s whereabouts after being reached out to by media, saying the ship was “drifting in the sea area northeast of Bornholm, Denmark between 6 September and 13 September 2022, while awaiting her next voyage instructions,” and that the tanker “departed the Port of Rotterdam on 2 September, after discharging her cargo. Once voyage orders were received, the vessel proceeded to her next port of call, Tallinn, Estonia.”