The group that made the documentary series about the sinking of Estonia filmed the wreck with a diving robot in the fall of 2019.
In Sweden, the Gothenburg district court has sentenced the two Swedish men who photographed the sunken car ferry Estonia to daily fines for violating the grave peace.
The men were part of a group filming a documentary series about the sinking of Estonia.
The district court already had time last year to issue a decision acquitting the men. At the time, the court ruled that the men broke the law on burial peace, but they cannot be convicted because Sweden cannot apply its own law to a foreign ship in international waters.
In autumn 2019, the group filming the documentary series about the sinking of Estonia filmed with a diving robot from a ship sailing under the German flag. Like Sweden, Finland and Estonia, Germany has not signed an agreement on Estonian burial peace.
The Court of Appeal, on the other hand, held in its February decision that the law on grave peace must be applied to the case despite the fact that the robot dives were carried out from a German boat off Estonia, which is why the case was returned to the district court again.
The documentary presented a new rift in the ship
The car ferry Estonia, which was on its way from Tallinn to Stockholm, sank in September 1994. 852 people died in Haver, most of whom were Swedes. According to the official accident investigation, the reason for Estonia’s sinking was the detachment of the bow visor in rough seas and water flooding the ship.
The documentary makers’ dives ended up in a TV documentary shown in 2020, according to which there is a tear in the side of the Estonian wreck, which has not been reported before. After this, Estonia’s law on burials has been temporarily changed, so that official research dives to determine the cause of the ship’s sinking could be carried out near the wreck.