'Hijackers' of Arctic Sea ghost ship in murky waters

How did petty thugs, drunks and drug dealers get arrested on a hijacked freighter and become linked to espionage, gun running and the Russian Mafia?

On the vast Soviet-era housing estate where they grew up, they were notorious - one killed a man in a barfight, another was a petty drug dealer, and others had convictions for drunkenness and thuggery. What nobody in the peeling, windswept towerblocks of Lasnamae can believe, though, is that wayward neighbours like Dmitry Bartenev and his friends would ever have graduated to international criminal espionage, involving secret arms deals, the Kremlin and Mossad. That, however, was the question being asked last week on the streets of this drab suburb of Tallinn, capital of the Baltic state of Estonia, as a detailed picture emerged for the first time of the men accused of July's mysterious hijacking of the Arctic Sea. The vessel, which vanished for several days after being boarded by "pirates" in the Baltic, is currently at the centre of the greatest Cold War riddle since the killing of Alexander Litvinkenko, with theories abounding that it was carrying an illicit cargo for the Kremlin or the Russian Mafia... Telegraph