Estonia Symposium Exposes Official Cover-Up and Demands New Investigation
By Christopher Bollyn
American Free Press
An international symposium on the sinking of Estonia has exposed the lies of the official version and brought the unanswered questions into the mainstream media for the first time.
TALLINN, Estonia – On the 11th anniversary of the sinking of Estonia, Europe's worst maritime disaster since World War II, a panel of international experts presented facts and research that prove the official final report to be a government sponsored cover-up of the true causes of the catastrophe that took more than 852 lives.
Helje Kaskel, a widow from the Estonia catastrophe, organized the well-attended public symposium on the sinking of Estonia, held at the National Library of Estonia in Tallinn on September 27, 2005. Demanding truth, justice, and accountability, Kaskel presented a resolution calling for a new investigation into the sinking of the passenger ferry, which sank under mysterious circumstances in the early hours of Sept. 28, 1994.
"The question, 'What caused the sinking of Estonia?' is still an unanswered question and the reason we are here today," Kaskel said as she opened the symposium that presented more than a dozen speakers on the subject.
"We need and deserve the answers that can only come from a full, fair, and complete investigation," Kaskel said, inspired by 9-11 widow Ellen Mariani's letter to Alvin K. Hellerstein, federal judge of the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York.
Kaskel organized the historic symposium over a period of five months from her home near Chicago and consulted with relatives in Estonia and Sweden as well as Ellen Mariani and William Rodriguez from the 9-11 truth movement in the United States.
On the day of the symposium, the leading Estonian daily paper Eesti Päevaleht, published the speech of the Swedish veteran journalist Sven Aner in which he raised the four main unanswered questions about the wreck:
What happened to the 9 kidnapped crewmembers who disappeared from Swedish hospitals?
Who were the unidentified passengers who were taken away from Sweden on two private planes shortly after the catastrophe?
What was the purpose of the first secret dive to the wreck and why is it censored?
Who was behind the shipments of military contraband on Estonia and where were they going?
Eesti Päevaleht said the governments of Estonia and Sweden should not ridicule the people, like Aner, who dare to raise the unanswered questions, but should end the "artificial silence" of the governments and provide answers.
Planned as a commemorative event to honor the victims and their families, the symposium was the only organized event held on the 11th anniversary of the shipwreck in either Sweden or Estonia, the two countries that suffered the greatest lost of life.
Edgar Savisaar, the former Estonian prime minister and current Minister of Economic Affairs and Communications, oversees transportation and sea safety. Savisaar was the first official speaker at the symposium, which opened with a musical tribute and prayer of commemoration by Avo Üprus, a member of parliament.
Because it was the first open and public discussion since the sinking occurred, the symposium received a great deal of attention in the media and provided a forum for researchers who have not been heard before in public. The question and answer period also resulted in significant new revelations about the weapons smuggling that was being done using the passenger ferry.
Professor Mati Õun, an adviser who worked in the inner circle at the Estonian Ministry of Defense at the time of the sinking, revealed that officials at the ministry had been involved in the shipment of military contraband that was carried on Estonia on the night it sank.
"We helped our bosses with this shipment and now 1,000 bodies are at the bottom of the sea," officials at the ministry told Õun in the aftermath of the sinking. Õun also said the shipment had been arranged by then supreme commander of Estonia's armed forces, Aleksander Einseln, a retired colonel of the U.S. Army.
Einseln, an Estonian émigré, left retirement in Palo Alto, California, to become the first supreme commander of the Estonian military after the Baltic republic was liberated from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Since Estonia sank, there have been reports that two large trucks carrying military contraband were escorted by the Estonian army to the waiting ferry, which left immediately after the trucks were loaded onto the car deck.
In the middle of the night, halfway to Stockholm, two explosive concussions rocked the ship, which quickly listed to starboard and sank within a half hour.
Hours after the catastrophe, Carl Bildt, then prime minister of Sweden, told the media that it was evident that the bow visor had opened. The loss of the bow visor had supposedly led to the opening of the car ramp, which in turn led to the flooding of the car deck and the capsizing and sinking of the vessel.
"Later developments seemed to follow a script," Bertil Calamnius, chairman of the Swedish relatives' organization AgnEf, the Working Group for Investigating the Estonia Shipwreck, said. Calamnius lost his daughter, Maria, on Estonia.
"Less than a week after the sinking and before the wreck was found," Calamnius said, "JAIC [the international panel that investigated the wreck], issued a first report saying that the loss of the bow visor had caused the accident. And during the three years of JAIC's work, no other theory was investigated."
This accident scenario, however, is physically impossible, according to Anders Björkman, a naval architect and marine engineer with the French-based Heiwa Co. An independent sea safety expert, Björkman designs and inspects this kind of roll-on, roll-off ferry for a living.
Björkman points to the fact that because the car deck is above the waterline, water on the car deck could not have caused the ferry to sink, although it could cause it to capsize, which did not occur with Estonia. To explain the quick sinking of Estonia, Björkman said there must be a hole below the waterline.
Gregg Bemis, the American who led the first private diving expedition with Jutta Rabe to Estonia in 2000, presented the scientific analysis of metal fragments taken from the jagged holes at the ship's bow. Three professional metallurgical labs from Britain, the U.S. and Germany, all concluded that explosions had deformed the metal. Rabe also discussed the evidence of explosions on the ship, a subject that has been censored in the mainstream media.
Björkman and Bemis presented the technical data heard at the symposium. Both experts agree that Swedish military divers removed the bow visor after the ferry had sunk. This was done to provide an explanation for the sinking and to enable the removal of the military contraband.
Håken Bergmark, a Swedish military diver, told Expressen, a daily paper, that he and 12 other divers had gone to the wreck in the beginning of October 1994 and discovered a large hole below the waterline. This dive, however, has never been mentioned.
Evelyn Sepp, a member of parliament, is the vice chair of the committee that will investigate the weapons transfers that occurred on Estonia during the month it sank. The committee will present its report at the beginning of 2006.
American Free Press and the former Spotlight are the first and only U.S. newspapers to have reported extensively about the weapons smuggling that occurred on Estonia, which is believed to have led to the sinking. AFP and this writer were sponsors of the symposium in Tallinn.
Marek Blus of Gdansk, Poland, spoke about the 1993 Jan Heweliusz passenger ferry disaster and the evidence that it too had been carrying secret weapons in overloaded railroad cars from Romania and the Czech Republic. Jan Heweliusz sank on its way from Poland to the southern Swedish port of Ystad.
Lars Ångström, a member of the Swedish parliament, spoke at the symposium about his efforts to introduce legislation to reopen the accident investigation. After Estonia sank, Sweden drafted an extra-territorial treaty, signed by seven nations, which bans the citizens of these countries from diving operations to the wreck for the purpose of retrieving corpses or material. Estonia, however, lies in international waters and does not have an owner.
Bertil Calamnius discussed the manipulation of the Swedish media and how it had failed to investigate and provide the public with straightforward and independent information on the catastrophe that took the lives of 502 Swedes and affected one-in-four Swedish families.
"The media are supposed to be a watchdog but in the case of Estonia they have complacently accepted and passed on the information given out by the authorities," Calamnius said.
This writer was the final speaker of the symposium and spoke about the similarities between how the controlled media covered-up the facts behind the Estonia catastrophe and 9-11.
"The pattern of the cover-up is the same," I said. "tight government control of the crime scene and destruction of crucial evidence that does not support the official version, a rigged investigation that is pre-determined not to blame anyone, and then, after a few years, a final report that supports the fairy tale."
At the end of the symposium, Kaskel presented a resolution that stated: "JAIC, in official statements given during the investigation and in its final report, has intentionally falsified relevant and essential facts using manipulated expert reports, edited underwater films and falsified testimonies of crewmembers to produce a document, the only purpose of which was to mislead the public.
"The intent and the actual result to produce a false report of an accident investigation by at least nine civil servants or appointees of three countries must be regarded as a criminal act," the resolution says, "Therefore, the relevant authorities should proceed against these persons in accordance with their national laws."
Eesti Ekspress, the biggest weekly newspaper in Estonia, voted Helje Kaskel the person of the week on Sept. 29, calling her the conductor of the parade of truth seekers.
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