"The Danish Defence can confirm that we are present in the area near the Chinese ship Yi Peng 3," the military wrote in an email to AFP, adding that it would make no further comment for the time-being.

The cargo ship, built in 2001 and owned by Chinese company Ningbo Yipeng Shipping Co, stopped overnight Tuesday to Wednesday in the Kattegat strait between Denmark and southwestern Sweden, according to the ship tracking site Marinetraffic.

The tracker also showed that the Yi Peng 3 had on Monday been in the area of the "C-Lion 1" cable linking Finland to Germany when it was damaged, though there is nothing to indicate that it was involved in the incident.

Early Sunday, another telecoms cable, the "Arelion", running from the Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland to Lithuania, was also damaged.

On Tuesday, German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius said the severed cables were likely the result of "sabotage".

"Nobody believes that these cables were accidentally severed," he said on the sidelines of a meeting of EU ministers in Brussels.

In October 2023, an undersea gas pipeline between Finland and Estonia had to be closed after it was damaged by the anchor of a Chinese cargo ship.

And in September 2022, a series of underwater blasts ruptured the Nord Stream pipelines that carried Russian gas to Europe, the cause of which has yet to be determined.

In August, the Wall Street Journal reported that Ukraine's top military commander at the time, Valery Zaluzhny, oversaw the plan to blow up the pipelines.

Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky approved of the plan, the paper said.

Ukraine rejected the claims as "absolute nonsense".

According to the specialised site VesselFinder, the Yi Peng 3 left the Russian port of Ust Luga, west of Saint Petersburg, on November 15.