| Missiles Retrieved From Kursk |
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By Sergei Shargorodsky
Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2001.
Two Granit missiles, out of 22, and five bodies were taken out overnight from Sunday, the state prosecutor's office said.
Work to find more bodies continued Monday in the mangled submarine's middle compartments. No more remains were believed to be contained in the three stern compartments, where survivors of the explosions that sank the Kursk remained alive for hours, said prosecution spokesman Leonid Troshin. Troshin said work was stopped briefly Monday because some compartments had to be cleared of high concentrations of life-threatening hydrogen sulfite. Investigators also could not reach a section connecting reactor compartments five and six, as it was filled with debris from the blasts, he said. The number of bodies retrieved was higher than the navy's initial forecast, according to which officials hoped to find the remains of only 30 to 40 sailors. Twelve bodies were retrieved by divers who examined the Kursk on the bottom of the Barents Sea last year. The submarine, one of the navy's most advanced vessels, was destroyed by two powerful explosions during military exercises in August 2000. The cause of the disaster, which killed the entire crew of 118, is not known, but officials are focusing on versions including a collision with an old mine or a foreign vessel, or a faulty torpedo launch. Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov, who heads the investigative team, said Sunday that sailors aboard the Kursk could not have been at fault for the explosions. He said ballistics experts were examining the Kursk to see whether it could have come in contact with an outside object. "There's a certain rubbed-off portion" on the body of the Kursk, Ustinov said on RTR television, apparently referring to the theory that the Kursk was hit by a foreign submarine.
Most foreign experts believe a malfunction in one of the Kursk's torpedoes caused the explosions. Ustinov reiterated that Russian military experts insist the Kursk's torpedoes were flawless. But he indicated that if there were a problem with a torpedo, it must have been technical and not a human error. "The human factor is absent," he said, because the crew had no contact with the torpedo except when executing an automatic command to fire it. On Sunday, seven bodies of dead Kursk sailors in identical coffins were flown to the cities of Kursk and Lipetsk in western Russia, Ufa in the Urals and Tomsk in Siberia, RTR reported. Ten more bodies are to be sent out Monday, the Navy said. Ustinov said some of the men's bodies showed signs of burns and they had been wearing gas masks because of the fire that the explosions ignited. In documentary footage by investigators shown on television this weekend, the inside of the Kursk was visible as a mass of charred and rusting cavities littered with pieces of twisted and torn metal. The bulk of the Kursk was raised from the sea floor and brought to Roslyakovo in a $65 million salvage operation performed by the Dutch consortium Mammoet-Smit International.
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Investigators examining the wreckage of the Kursk nuclear submarine have removed three cruise missiles and the bodies of 45 sailors since the vessel was brought to dry dock in the Arctic port of Roslyakovo, officials said Monday. 
