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  D. Further Information received from Sweden, Finland and Estonia after the Publication of our Report
 
 
18. The Interrogation of the JAIC Key Witness Silver Linde before a Finnish Court - Page 4
 
During the interrogation before the Espoo Court Linde testified the following:

 

 

 

Linde:   On the night of the same day we were taken to Estonia by plane and then, immediately after we got off the plane at the Tallinn airport, as soon as we had got out, we were surrounded by policemen who wanted to interrogate us immediately. That is, I can also remember the policeman, he was a representative of the Estonian Transportation Police, Väinö Karmi, and I said to him that is it not possible to put off the interrogation because I had been interrogated three times already. Apart from that, flying on that small plane had been quite restless, my head was nearly torn through and this whole accident was pressing on me. Yes, and then he answered by saying that here you have a paper and I am asking you to tell me here in writing that you refuse to give testimony. But I did not write any paper or document and I was taken nowhere for an interrogation.
     
Gahmberg:   Is it so that actually you were threatened by the shipping company?
     
Linde:   That is, I should put it like this: About a month or a month and a half after the sea accident when I returned to the ships of the shipping company, they did not treat people who had been rescued from Estonia very friendly.
     
Gahmberg:   Can you be a bit more specific about this statement, what do you mean by it?
     
Linde:  

That is, I would start by saying that continuing to work on that ship which started after Estonia, it was obviously Mare Balticum, that is, I got a job on that ship half by force, by stressing and making pressure, that my job was gone and I had to get my work back and it was on that new ship.

After I had returned home three or four days later, around eight o’clock, after eight at night, the Estonian security police came to my home, I was then living at Tartu in southern Estonia. And then I was taken to the house of the security police for an interrogation. And I was then met by three interrogators with whom came here direct hatred. And then one of them said that here we have your interrogation reports and not everything in them is quite correct. I said that this difference may be due to the fact that the first interrogation took place at a Turku hospital with an interpreter who had no knowledge of the language, and in the other interrogation there was the Estonian police. That is, there I was asked to immediately write a paper in which I should tell what this difference in my opinion resulted from, and I said that it was not possible for me to check the way the interpreter had interpreted and in addition to that the questions may have been different, different questions may have been asked, and, besides, all people understand the answers in a different way.

They did not tell about these differences, they did not tell about differences and they did not even put two documents side by side to make it possible to see what differences there were, and they did not tell about these differences.

That is, I remember Meister and Neidre better, not so Laur, but in Turku there were Meister, Neidre and Laur taking part.

These people were not present at the interrogations that took place at the police station, the interrogations at the police station were carried out by policemen.

A few months later, I cannot now remember the months, but I was working on the line Tallinn-Helsinki, then the afore-mentioned Väinö Karmi, this man from the transportation police called me again. He interrogated me twice and there he put pressure on me to make me change a point of time by ten minutes. It was about two points of time given by two people who had been asleep at time in question, and he claimed that, or in other words, it was claimed there that the point of time given by me who was up and awake, that the point of time indicated by me was inaccurate whereas the points of time stated by the people who were asleep were more accurate.

That is, he appealed that if you change this point of time then you will be left alone and you will no longer be disturbed. That he would no longer fetch me for any interrogations if I changed the point of time, and then in connection with another interrogation, because the interrogations always took two to three hours, then I finally, fed up, said that you can do whatever you wish. Yes, then at the end I said to him that you may do with the point of time what you want because I really cannot take part in these interrogations any more. And then he recorded these interrogations and they were also written down on paper but he had a Dictaphone on the desk but I cannot, of course, tell which parts he actually recorded but I should say that if he did make recordings, then the cassettes, the cassettes must be somewhere.  

That is, I do not know what the reason was for his being so eager to change the 10 minutes'  time specification. I told them everything like it was but I do not know for what reason there was for this 10-minute's  ? break or a need to change.

     
Gahmberg:   With other words, can it be concluded that the point of time started by you earlier was changed by 10 minutes at this interrogation?
     
Linde:   That is, I cannot really say what he needed this 10-minute change for, it was between half past twelve and one o’clock, that is, this refers to the period of time between half past twelve and one o’clock. At half past twelve, I started making a round and then, at one o’clock or a couple of minutes after one o’clock captain Andersson and I  in his wake climbed up to the bridge. After one o’clock or at one o’clock, we were there already, on those stairs which led up to the bridge, there is a flight of stairs there.
     
Gahmberg:   Is it your opinion that after this interrogation the points of time stated before were different from what you had originally stated them to be?
     
Linde:   That is, I stated some points of time earlier in Turku and in Estonia, and after this Karmi interrogated me for the last time, after that I have not had anything to do with the police in Estonia with regard to this Estonia issue.
     
Gahmberg:   You have made eight so-called official statements for authorities and various parties in this connection. If I now say that there are differences in the contents of these statements, is there a reason for that?
     
Linde:   At least I should say that Karmi told me to change them by 10 minutes to some direction. However, I have no clear idea as to where he wanted the change to be made. But I would like to ask how big a difference there is between the points of time stated by me. That is,  first of all the fact that when we were lifted from the sea in the morning, they wanted to have these times right away, but it was, of course, difficult to say and it took time until one was fully conscious and with a clear head. In these first points of time, there can really be some deviation but as a matter of fact only this Karmi is very "kiinni", so to speak, and has tried or, in other words, put pressure on me to make me change that point of time.
     
Gahmberg:   With other words: If there are such differences in the state-ments made later, is it because of this Karmi who interrogated you?
     
Linde:   That is,  the last interrogation was at Karmi's place, and that I can probably now remember best. Before that there was, in a way, again such a quiet period of time because there were no interrogations, and the last one may well be the one that is uppermost in my mind.
Final remarks by Silver Linde at the end of the Interview:
  • Take that book by Andi Meister ‘Unfinished Logbook’. The last sentences in that book are something like that: “The last routine round of the watch sailor will make us contemplate (meaning: thoughtful).” Andi Meister heard that a member of the commission, somebody from behind the table said that word “scapegoat”. The last word of the book is “scapegoat”. 

  • And then ... I was working on the ferry Meloodia at that time. Yes, it was in summer that year. It must have been in summer. The wife of Piht, well, the other captain who, yes .. she lodged a complaint against me and Treu and fled the papers, well, that how could that kind of people work on a ferry. Well, people like me and Margus Treu.
    Yes, .. well, Captain Erik Moik keeps saying that I never tried to go down there and well, that kind of nasty statements ... said about me.
    End of Interview.
note   Note: It is quite obvious that many people, not only in Estonia, do believe that Silver Linde never made his last round to the car deck, e.g. Rolf Sörman and Pierre Thiger who saw him at the bar in the Pub Admiral from ca. 00.30 hours to at least 00.45 hours and Per-Erik Ehrnsten who saw him coming from the aft crew accommodation in the inner port alleyway of deck 7 walking into the forward central stairway at about 01.05/01.07 hours, some minutes after the heavy heels.

After all this is the key witness of the JAIC on whose “evidence” the JAIC’s scenario is based. Since similar importance was put at least on the “evidence” of the watch engineer Margus Treu it has to be assumed with certainty that he was exposed to a similar treatment by the police as Silver Linde was which is reflected by his time change from ca. 01.00 hours when he felt the two double bangs to ca. 01.15 hours in all subsequent statements. The change in the testimonies of Kadak and Sillaste are similar which needs no further explanations in the light of the new Linde interview.
 
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