Norway said its coast guards had arrested the ship, the Opon, on Tuesday night for failing to register with the required controlling checkpoint after it finished fishing in the Norwegian economic zone.
According to the source, the captain of the trawler had said that the vessel had been arrested after a technical failure meant that the information he had sent to the Norwegian coast guards failed to get through.
The trawler was escorted to the Norwegian port of Tromso and Norwegian coast guards are studying the log-book of radio exchanges.
The incident is the latest in a series involving Russian ships and Norwegian coast guards. The most serious one happened in the middle of last October, when the Norwegian authorities pursued another trawler, the Elektron, for five days across the Barents Sea. The captain had been accused of violating fishing regulations and held two Norwegian border guards on board the ship until it reached Russian territorial waters.
