By Giulio Piovaccari
MILAN (Reuters) -An Italian appeals court on Friday confirmed the arrest of a Ukrainian man suspected by Germany of coordinating attacks on three Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea in 2022, his lawyer said.
The 49-year-old man, whose full name was given in court but has been identified only as Serhii K. under German privacy laws, was arrested on Thursday near the Italian coastal town of Rimini under a European warrant.
The appeals court in Bologna, about 120 kilometres (75 miles) north-west of Rimini, said it would reconvene on Sept. 3 to consider his possible extradition to Germany, although a decision may not be made on that day, the lawyer said.
The man told the court he was a former soldier, the lawyer told Reuters by telephone.
He was filmed in handcuffs during his transfer from Rimini to the Bologna court, making a defiant three-finger gesture representing Ukraine’s national coat of arms.
He was part of a group of people who planted devices on the pipelines near the Danish island of Bornholm in the Baltic Sea, according to a statement issued by the German prosecutor’s office on Thursday.
He faces charges of collusion to cause an explosion, anti-constitutional sabotage and destruction of important structures.
The arrest came just as Kyiv engages in fraught diplomatic discussions with the United States over how to end the war in Ukraine without giving away major concessions and swathes of its own territory to Russia.
Italy’s Carabinieri police arrested the man in San Clemente, a small town near Rimini on Italy’s Adriatic coast, where he was holidaying with his family, acting on a European arrest warrant.
The German prosecutors allege that he and his accomplices had set off from Rostock on Germany’s northeastern coast in a sailing yacht to carry out the attack.
(Reporting by Giulio Piovaccari, writing by Sara Rossi, editing by Gavin Jones and Hugh Lawson)
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