A white whale with a sort of harness and a camera mount caught off the coast of northern Norway has triggered suspicions of “Russian spying”.
Fishermen in Finnmark County have had a series of strange encounters with a white beluga whale. According to them, the animal looked “tame” and seemed to specifically look for the fishing boats outside the island of Ingøy, national broadcaster NRK reported.
“We were going to cast a drag net when we saw a white whale swimming between the boats”, fisherman Joar Hesten recalled. “As it approached, we saw it had some sort of harness on it”.
According to Hesten, the animal kept approaching other fishermen's boats in an attempt to peel off the straps.
The strange encounter with the tame attention-seeking whale has instantly spurred a theory, inplicating Norway's vast eastern neighbour.
“This is not something any Norwegian scientist has been going on with. What we think is that this may come from Russia”, Audun Rikardsen, a professor at the Department of Arctic and Marine Biology at the Norwegian Arctic University in Tromsø (UiT) told NRK. “We know that in Russia they have had domestic whales in captivity and also that some of these have apparently been slipping free. Then they often seek out boats”.
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His colleague Martin Biuw went so far as to suggest that the Russian Navy is behind the whale experiment.
“If…
