Graveyard

The vessel was put into traffic 1980 as ”Viking Sally” on the routes between Stockholm and the Finnish ports of Turku and Helsinki.
The ship was a construction from the cold war era with surveillance in the cabins by the music radio and PA system. The Swedish customs were eager to get the ship working on the newly independent Baltic countries, because a lot of drugs and military equipment flowed in from the former east. The swedes are used to have control of their borders.
In January 1994 the ship was due to start the traffic between Tallinn and Stockholm by Estline in Tallinn. The vessel had to be upgraded for the new line from Coastal Traffic to the trade of Open Baltic. Estline decided also to install stabilizers to avoid seasickness at the Baltic Sea.
A fire occurred onboard starboard side when installing the stabilizers at the Finnish Turku Shipyard. The safety inspectors were told to not take note of this…“Estonia” left the shipyard 14.01 1994 before works were finished, details inside were still only spot welded. Some hydraulic and electrical works were also unfinished. Estline wanted the vessel working immediately not to loose money. The idea was to complete the works at sea by the crew. If the work was done by qualified welders and platters under proper conditions is unclear. The fire was never reported nor were any steel plates of the hull changed. High temperature makes steel lose its strength.
At the night of the accident some 9 months later the crew had problems with the starboard stabilizer fin, it had problems to fold out. The same problem had occurred several times before.
The stabilizers on deck 0 were located in a closed compartment without access for control from the outside except a watertight door on the same deck, a dangerous and incorrect solution.
It is thus possible that, the starboard stabilizer foundation broke and ripped open the bilge strake a short distance - maybe 2 metres - and a 100 mm wide opening developed. Then about 100 m3/min of water could easily flow in. As the stabilizer box was installed just aft of the heeling tank, it is possible that the shell damage extended into the empty heeling tank, which thus was flooded.
The ramp was closed the when the vessel went down, the visor was intact and removed later with explosives to blame the German shipyard and to remove the secret cargo from car deck.

Drug traffic was concealed in military transports.
A number of heavy trucks had passed through the gate in Tallinn the very same night.
The port authorities knew about a secret transport and wanted to get rid of it as soon as possible. Nobody there were aware of the contents.
Sweden had become one of the main transit countries for heavy drugs, cocaine through the port of Gothenburg and heroine from the Baltic countries, produced mostly from Afghan poppy fields. Same procedure as in Colombia and other countries in S. America, as well as in Vietnam, Cambodia and Burma.
After passing the Swedish boarder distribution world wide gets easier.
The financing of CIA and European intelligence service’s black operations are made by drugs and weapon trafficking. Big funds are transferred to the leaders of these operations. A company involved by the Swedish authorities in the investigation of the Estonia accident was Rockwell. This company had no casualty investigation experience, and not a very good reputation as a subsidiary to Halliburton. The only reason getting the contract was to produce disinformation and to work on the cover up. US Vice president Richard Cheney was deeply involved with Halliburton, a big Pentagon contractor. No official or independent commission from any of the countries involved would ever get a real chance of making an honest investigation.

When a Mayday signal came from ”Estonia” a risk occurred that the trade was about to be investigated. The captain wanted to save his crew and the passengers and decided to go for Söderarm to put the vessel on shore. Somebody gave him a contra
order. The radar plot from nearby Utö weather station has disappeared, showing the captain changing direction to shallow waters but later altering for deeper waters to get rid of the ship. What made him change his mind?
852 humans died.

The Swedish authorities panicked and wanted to hide the transport for ever, by constructing a concrete cemetery of the ship. All following desinformation had the same goal. m/v ”Estonia” was unofficially used for secret military transports under the jurisdiction of the Swedish Government by the Swedish military intelligence MUST and thus the government would be blamed for the transport. The Swedish NMA had permitted the “Estonia” to sail with open watertight doors and without correct lifesaving equipment since 1980 and there was not a chance to evacuate all onboard in a dry and safe condition. "Please, jump into the water in case of an accident" seems to have been the standing order since 1980. No way Swedish authorities wanted the real cause of the accident known.

Radio traffic down the same night at 01.03 hours.
No Swedish navy vessels went to assist “Estonia”. The Finnish vessels from Silja Line and Viking Line pass the same route every night and were at eye sight and some 30 minutes away. Instead of hurrying to aid after the Mayday signal they spent many crucial minutes in a discussion of the position of “Estonia”.
The captain of “Estonia” Avo Piht disappeared 2004. So have 10 of his crewmates. Three authorised persons involved in the investigation and critical to the manipulations are dead, Simo Arnio, Börje Stenström and Odd Engström. A russian former KGB officer, custom´s officer Igor Kristopovitj who was listening to the radio traffic at The Baltic Sea the same night was murdered. He was in charge of the recordings for the Russian authorities.
Interfering in the drug traffic made by these professionals is crucial. A decade later a huge transport of 1st class heroin was apprehended by Russian customs. Some people had not received their bribes so they did not let the truck loads through the boarder. The answer came quite quickly, some 300 children were killed in a school attack in Beslan a few days later.

Number two is always the worst.