"..... The response fuelled reports that the ship was carrying a secret cargo. Suspicion mounted when sources close to Mossad claimed that Israel had tipped off Russia that the vessel was smuggling missiles to Iran .
The ship was finally intercepted near the African islands of Cape Verde , 24 days after being seized. Eight men from Latvia , Estonia and Russia were arrested and flown in a military transport to a Moscow jail.
A flurry of diplomatic activity between Russia and Israel followed. President Shimon Peres visited Moscow the next day and Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, made a secret trip to the Kremlin.
Speculation about the ship’s supposed weapons cargo centred on whether the hijackers had been set up by Mossad or Russia ’s secret service, allowing the Kremlin to take control of the cargo while claiming to have foiled an act of piracy. But the Russians denied that the Arctic Sea had been carrying missiles........
The crew dismissed the claims that the Arctic Sea had been smuggling weapons loaded during repairs in the Russian port of Kaliningrad . They said they would have been discovered when the ship docked in Finland to take on its cargo of timber.
“There was no secret cargo,” insisted one crew member. “We’d all be in jail if we’d been caught smuggling weapons to Iran .”... Israeli sources nevertheless insisted last week that Mossad had alerted Moscow to a secret cargo. Experts said the vessel might have been carrying weapon parts that could easily have been hidden......"
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