A total of 94 bodies of sailors who died inside the Russian nuclear submarine Kursk have been recovered, but the operation is being slowed by ice inside the wreck, the Russian Northern Fleet said Thursday.
“The lower level of the fourth compartment has not yet been inspected by the experts due to the presence of ice,” the military prosecutor of the Northern Fleet, Colonel Vladimir Mulov, told AFP.
He said experts had not agreed to a deadline to finish work on the wreck because the issue of security was paramount as seven missiles remained on board as well as the nuclear reactor.
Mulov had announced January 31 that work on the submarine, which was raised from the sea floor in October and transferred to a dry dock in the town of Rolyakovo near Murmansk, was nearing an end.
An explosion in the torpedo bay is thought to have been responsible for the sinking of the submarine on August, 12 1999 but the reasons for the explosion still remain unclear.
“At least four torpedoes exploded”, said investigators from the military prosecutor, Viktor Chein and Artur Ieguiev, in an interview published Thursday by the Russian daily Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
The hypothesis of a collision with a foreign submarine which was rejected recently by Vice Prime Minister Ilia Klebanov has not been definitely excluded, they said, mentioning that certain circumstances “implicitly” favour this explanation.
Investigators mentioned reports of “a non-identified damaged submarine which may have left the area of the Kursk’s sinking” shortly after the catastrophe.
After inspection of the hold of the Kursk and hermetical sealing of all openings, it will be transferred to the Nerpa military factory in Snejnogorsk, where it will be dismantled.
