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“Bloomberg” agency has published its revelations concerning the blast at Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in the Turkish town Refahiye on 5 August, 2008.

Some of the worst damage was felt by the State Oil Fund of the Republic of Azerbaijan, which lost $1 billion in export revenue while the line was shut down, according to Jamala Aliyeva, a spokeswoman for Heydar Aliyev Foundation.

The explosion caused more than 30,000 barrels of oil to spill in an area above a water aquifer and cost BP and its partners $5 million a day in transit tariffs during the closure, according to communications between BP and its bankers cited in “The Oil Road,” a book about the pipeline.

After 7 years the West unveiled new details about the incident. The main weapon used to blow up the valve station was a keyboard, “Bloomberg” says. As a result of their investigation the company found out that the hackers gained access to the system through the surveillance cameras. Once they got into the internal network, the hackers placed a malicious program in it to shut down alarms, cut off communications and super-pressurize the crude oil in the line afterwards. No evidence of a physical bomb was found at the scene of the incident.

The pipeline was outfitted with sensors and cameras to monitor every step of its almost 1770 km from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean. Yet, the blast that blew it out of commission did not trigger a single distress signal, “Bloomberg” reports.

Almost immediately, the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, an armed separatist group in Turkey, claimed credit. It made sense because of the PKK’s history of bombing pipelines. The Turkish government’s claim of mechanical failure, on the other hand, was widely disputed in media reports. Hilmi Guler, then Turkey’s energy minister, said there was no evidence of sabotage. Huseyin Sagir, a spokesman for Botas International Ltd., the state-run company that operates the pipeline in Turkey, said the line’s computer systems had not been tampered with.

Neither the Energy Ministry of Turkey, nor Botas International Ltd. and not BP either responded to requests to comment on the causes of the blast. In its annual report BP referred to the incident as a fire. Years later, however, BP claimed in documents filed in a legal dispute that it was not able to meet shipping contracts after the blast due to “an act of terrorism.”

According to US intelligence officials, the main suspect is Russia. They came to this kind of conclusion taking into consideration the testimony provided by the people briefed on the investigation, as well as referring to their own assumptions. The article stresses that three days after the BTC blast Russia went to war with Georgia. In the meantime a Turkish newspaper cited Alexander Dugin, then adviser to the Russian parliament, declaring the BTC was “dead.” Georgian Prime Minister Nika Gilauri accused Russia of sending the jets to bomb the BTC near the city of Rustavi. However, the bombs missed their presumed target and the pipeline remained undamaged.

The pipeline BTC, carrying the crude from the Caspian, starts in Azerbaijan, traverses Georgia and ends at the Turkish port city of Ceyhan. As a result, it is deliberately built to circumvent Russia, who aims to reassert control over Central Asia.