Zweden bezorgt over Baltische pijplijn (en)

Sweden has expressed concern about the possible damage to the environment by the planned Russian-German gas pipeline under the Baltic sea.

Prime minister Goran Persson has said that the North European Gas Pipeline risked disturbing the waste, including possible mines, on the seabed.

"When you build such a large pipeline on the bottom of the Baltic Sea, you stir up a lot of sediment at the bottom, where there are mines, poisons and other things that have been dumped over decades," he is quoted as saying by the UK daily, The Independent.

"You risk setting off a major environmental disturbance on top of all the other environmental problems the Baltic Sea has."

Greenpeace Russia has also warned of the dangers of disturbing the seabed which is riddled with German second world war chemical weapons dumped by the Soviet Union.

"Some of the chemical weapons were dumped in the hulls of sunken ships and we know where they are," an expert from the organisation told the newspaper.

"But others were just thrown off the sides of ships. There could be 60,000 tons of chemical weapons down there", he said.

The around 1200km pipeline, scheduled to begin operating in 2010, was agreed by Russian leader Vladimir Putin and his then German counterpart Gerhard Schroder, who now sits on the board of the North European Gas Pipeline company.

Russia's Gazprom, which already supplies about a quarter of Europe's energy needs, owns 51 percent of the pipeline, with Germany's E.ON and BASF each owning 24.5 percent.

The pipeline will run from St Petersburg under the Baltic Sea to Greifswald in Germany.

The planned route has also caused worries of a different - political - nature as it bypasses states that might have problematic ties with Moscow such as Poland, the Baltic states and Ukraine.

Warsaw and Vilnius have made particularly strong comments against the route of the pipeline.

The European Commission has also in the past voiced criticism about the Russian-German deal.

"We should never have the situation we will have with this pipeline, where one partner country decided a project that is not acceptable to others, not even discussing it," said the Latvian EU energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs in May.