No? Why would the laws of the flag country matter for an anchor slowly drifting to the seabed detached from a vessel several km away?
Edit: I’m pretty sure most, if not all, such countries don’t even ascribe any legal status to wrecked and sunken lifeboats, let alone anchors. Probably most countries don’t even have a formal penalty, of any kind, for lifeboats detached and sunken, for any reason, for anyone on the ship.
The „anchor accidents“ with cables are normally when a ship is dragging an anchor over the cable. That’s property damage of someone else’s stuff, which is a crime in pretty much any country. And even if you drop your anchor to intentionally destroy someone else’s property, that would be a crime anywhere. You don’t need a specific law for anchors.
Vessel captains drop anchor all the time if they are caught out of port in a stormy area. And if it’s a big enough storm they are quite literally dragged around along with the anchor.
It literally happens every month on Earth.
It just’s implausible that dragging alone would be a crime in any flag country.
Edit: Maybe they can criminalize dragging it for a very long distance, say 10+ km, but I’m pretty sure the most popular flag countries do not, e.g. Liberia.
Do you not understand what intentionally anchoring in a place means on a ship?
I’ll repeat as clearly as possible, literally every single month on planet Earth many ship captains are intentionally putting very heavy objects into the water in areas that they know may contain some property that their anchor may hit/drag/snare/etc… on something.
This is usually done when the probability is very low, but in bad enough conditions they may just not care regardless of probability, and anchor anyways.
Ok, so we could have saved 5 comments if you just answered „yes“ to my first question. The cable disruptions most likely aren’t real accidents but sabotage, coupled with plausible deniability explanations of anchor accidents. That’s why I was talking about intentional damage from the start. Read the thread again.
Edit: I’m pretty sure most, if not all, such countries don’t even ascribe any legal status to wrecked and sunken lifeboats, let alone anchors. Probably most countries don’t even have a formal penalty, of any kind, for lifeboats detached and sunken, for any reason, for anyone on the ship.