As the snow fell, about 1,000 tearful mourners attended the funeral service at Saint Petersburg's historic Peter the Great Naval School.

The 11 bodies were among those retrieved from the wreck of the nuclear-powered vessel since it was raised and towed to dry-dock near the Russian Arctic city of Murmansk last month.

A further 19 bodies are to be buried in St Petersburg at a later date. So far, 55 bodies have been recovered from the Kursk, of which 45 have been identified.

The Kursk sank to the bottom of the Barents Sea with the loss of all 118 on board after a series of unexplained explosions on August 12 last year.

The 11 bodies were laid to rest in the Serafimovskoye cemetery where they joined those of two sailors who were buried after they were recovered from the sunken submarine in November last year.

"The story of the Kursk will not be over until all the crew members are buried," said Igor Kurdin, the chairman of the Saint Petersburg ex-submariners club.

Most of the hull is in dry dock after being refloated in a major international salvage operation completed in October.

Although its sinking remains a mystery, investigators examining the wreck have uncovered a key recording device that they hope will reveal what happened on August 12 last year.

Russian navy guards of honor pay their last respects 17 November 2001, during the funeral ceremony of 11 navy sailors of the sunken Kursk nuclear submarine, St. Petersburg. Some one thousand people filed past the coffins of the killed submariners during a funeral service at the historic Peter the Great Naval School today. AFP/EPA Photo by Sergeu Tyagin

"The information that this instrument contains can help the investigation to establish what underwater objects were in the zone and what their role was in the catastrophe," Oleg Goncharov, a member of the military prosecutor's investigation team, told AFP Saturday.

The apparatus, a nautical equivalent of a "black box", records underwater sounds near and around the submarine and was found in the Kursk's hyrdoacoustics chamber.

However, it was badly damaged in the explosion and investigators may have difficulty in accessing the information it holds, Goncharov added.

A first "black box" was found in the Kursk in October, when the submarine was towed to dry-dock near Murmansk.

Also Saturday, the deputy prime minister in charge of the Kursk investigation, Ilia Klebanov, said the investigative commission had "a lot of indirect proof" that a collision with a foreign submarine had provoked the Kursk disaster.

Vice Admiral Mikhail Motsak, commander of the Northern fleet, said in an interview with Izvestia Saturday that listening devices had detected a second submarine near the Kursk before the disaster.

Russian investigators have held to three theories into the sinking of the Kursk: a collision with another submarine, an explosion of a defective torpedo, or collision with a World War II mine.

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More Bodies Recovered From Kursk
Moscow (AFP) Oct 27, 2001
More bodies were retrieved from the wrecked Russian nuclear submarine Kursk on Saturday, while a video shot inside the wreckage showed for the first time just how formidable the blast which sent the ship to the bottom must have been.

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