RUSSIA: The Russian navy's top brass led commemoration ceremonies yesterday for the 118 sailors who died on board the Kursk nuclear submarine, even as relatives of the victims accuse senior officials of denying responsibility for the accident in August 2000, writes Daniel McLaughlin in Moscow
Naval commanders dropped wreaths into the Arctic waters of the Barents Sea and observed a minute's silence at 11.32 a.m. exactly four years after a series of explosions ripped through the Kursk's torpedo bay and sent the 18,000-tonne vessel plunging to the sea bed.
A government commission worked in secret for two years to establish the cause of the blasts - a chain reaction sparked by a leak of volatile fuel from a faulty torpedo - but failed to apportion any blame for Russia's worst nuclear submarine disaster.
"Mistakes were made in training and preparation, and at the time when they set sail," chief investigator Mr Artur Egiyev said yesterday. "But they weren't part of the reason for the disaster - that was the torpedo explosion. Therefore no one is guilty for causing this catastrophe"
Relatives of the victims insist that someone should be held to account for failing to properly train the sailors on how to escape from what was one the Russian navy's finest vessels. They also ask how a malfunctioning torpedo was allowed on board the Kursk, and why safety systems failed to prevent the catastrophic chain reaction that ripped a huge hole in the submarine's bow.
They also say the whitewash is at odds with President Vladimir Putin's pledge, a week after the disaster, to expose those responsible for an accident that highlighted the increasingly decrepit condition of Moscow's once-mighty armed forces.
Three senior navy commanders were discretely demoted, and eight admirals sacked in what many saw as a quiet reckoning over the Kursk disaster, but many top officials held onto their positions despite shrouding the accident in a fog of lies. They took two days to admit that the Kursk was in trouble, and then insisted that it was a minor incident.
Navy spokesmen said contact had been made with the sailors and that oxygen was being pumped into the submarine. Later, they insisted that mayday signals were coming from the stricken vessel, which lay beneath more than 100 metres of icy water.
None of that was true, and immediate offers of help from abroad were rejected. It took a week for Russians to be told that most of the sailors had probably died within minutes of the explosion. Navy investigators still insist that no one survived for more than eight hours.
Relatives' efforts to reopen the investigation into the disaster foundered again in June, when a Moscow court confirmed a previous ruling that the no one was to blame and no one on board could have been saved in the time available.
A senior navy source told state news agency Ria yesterday that Russia had learned the lessons of the Kursk, by improving training of its sailors and investing in a new generation of rescue vessels.
A similar accident could not occur now, the unnamed source insisted, before adding: "Or at least we, as professionals, will do everything we can to make that the case."