White House denies US involvement in Nord Stream explosion

Author: Web Desk

WASHINGTON, Feb 8 (Reuters) – The White House on Wednesday dismissed a blog post by a U.S. investigative journalist alleging the United States was behind explosions of the Nord Stream gas pipelines as “utterly false and complete fiction.”

Reuters has not corroborated the report, published by U.S. investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, which said an attack was carried out last September at the direction of President Joe Biden.

“This is utterly false and complete fiction,” said Adrienne Watson, a spokesperson for the White House National Security Council. Spokespeople for the CIA and State Department said the same.

The pipelines are multibillion-dollar infrastructure projects that will transport Russian gas under the Baltic Sea to Germany.

Sweden and Denmark, in whose exclusive economic zones the blasts occurred, have both concluded that the pipelines were deliberately blown up, but have not said who might be to blame.

The incident has been described as “an act of sabotage” by the US and NATO. Moscow has blamed the West for the unexplained explosions that caused the ruptures. Neither side has provided evidence.

On Wednesday, Russia’s foreign ministry said the United States had questions to answer over its role in explosions on the pipelines.

Construction of Nord Stream 2, designed to double the volume of gas that Russia could send directly to Germany under the sea, was completed in September 2021 but was never put into operation after Berlin shelved certification just days before Moscow sent its troops into Ukraine last February.

Hersh, a former reporter for the New York Times and New Yorker, received numerous honors for his investigative reporting on the Vietnam War and the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal that followed the American invasion of Iraq.

More recently, he sparked controversy by disputing the Obama administration’s account of how Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011 by American special forces and by blaming Syrian rebels for the August 2013 sarin nerve agent attack on a Damascus suburb that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of civilians.