Norwegian rescuers discover sub's hatch damaged

Norwegian rescuers discover sub's hatch damaged
REUTERS

MURMANSK, RUSSIA, AUG 20: Norwegian rescuers on Sunday found that the escape hatch on the Russian submarine lying on the Arctic seabed was damaged, jeopardising attempts to get inside the sub, now thought to be a mass grave for the 118 crew.

RTR state television said from a cruiser in the Barents Sea that an underwater camera had revealed cracks in the area of the hatch and that deep sea divers would go down immediately to inspect the submarine, The Kursk, and decide how to proceed.

RTR's correspondent Arkady Mamontov said the divers had already been in a decompression chamber preparing to dive. "Now all hopes are with the British and Norwegian rescuers," he said. The Kursk sank on August 12 after a still unexplained possible collision and explosion.

Mamontov said the divers would not try to enter The Kursk. "They will start knocking on it to find where the water is and where it is empty. It will take some time. Reports are coming in every minute. Now we are waiting for an answer to the main question -- are there any air pockets in the sub, is there life?"

Damage to the escape hatch could put paid to a list of ways of saving the sub, where Russian officials now say many men died in the first few minutes after the explosions.

The rescuers had been planning to use the British navy's LR5rescue sub, sitting on a mother ship some 10-12 km (six to seven miles) from the Kursk, to try to dock it to the Kursk.

LAST, SLIM HOPE

RTR said a more likely option now was to use only the diversand work "with human hands only" in a bid to get into the sub.

The international effort is the last, slim hope for rescuingany survivors after an explosion wrecked the Front sections of the nuclear-powered submarine and sent it plunging at speed 108 metres (354 feet) to the floor of the Barents Sea.

The Russian navy says it believes this impact led to adetonation of the Kursk's torpedoes, causing a much bigger explosion.

On Saturday Mikhail Motsak, head of the Northern Fleetgeneral staff, made the announcement everyone had feared: that most of the crew had almost certainly been killed outright, and by now the rest were likely to be dead.

"Hard as it is to say this, we will most likely have to saythat our worst expectations have come true," he said in a statement broadcast on national television.

"It is the gravest disaster that I, as a sailor, have knownin the history of the submarine fleet."

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, heading a governmentinquiry Commission, said there was "a chance for survivors in the tail sections but this is mostly theoretical".

Russians met the news with sorrow, shock and renewed angerat official handling of the affair.

"I cried when I heard. Although it has been obvious for along time that there will be lots of dead, we still had hope," said Anna Kornitsuva, a resident of Severomorsk, the far northern Port where the Kursk is based.

Andrei Konovalov, a sailor, said: "We had thought this for aweek. If they are announcing it today that means they have known about it for days. They are treating us like idiots again."