Severomorsk, Russia - The Russian navy searched on Monday for the bodies of seven crew members in a nuclear submarine that sank in the Barents Sea as the press demanded to know why they were being transported in a 40-year-old "rust bucket."
Nine sailors died at the weekend when their K-159 submarine foundered in a storm while being towed to a port.
"For two and a half days, the search has gone on unsuccessfully but the mission around Kildin island will continue until navy chief Vladimir Kuroyedov orders otherwise," the Northern Fleet's spokesperson Vladimir Navrotsky told AFP.
Seven sailors are believed to be in the wreck of the submarine. Three of their colleagues managed to escape the craft but only one of them survived. The bodies of the other two were recovered.
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'The sailors on top probably tried to warn their comrades' The accident was a bitter reminder of the tragedy of the Kursk nuclear submarine that sank in the Barents Sea on August 12, 2000 after a fuel leak from a torpedo caused an explosion. All 188 crew on board perished.
According to a Northern Fleet source quoted by the ITAR-TASS news agency, navy divers have been unable to get through the hatch of the K-159 because it is too narrow. The submarine is located on the seabed at a depth of 238m.
Moscow newspapers questioned why there were crew aboard the submarine, with one daily suggesting that the sailors had been hitching a ride to a new port.
"If the submarine had no electricity and no ventilation, which was the case with the K-159, it should be sealed hermetically and towed without any sailors onboard," Mikhail Volzhensky, a member of a state commission on navy ship maintenance, told the Izvestia daily.
The Kommersant business daily said that, according to regulations, the crew should have been either on the submarine's upper deck or the conning-tower hatch, but most of them were inside the doomed vessel.
'The sea does not pardon mistakes or inexactitude'
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