November 1, 2001	Thursday	Shaba’an 14, 1422

MURMANSK, Oct 31: Russian investigators discovered a touching personal message on Tuesday in a bottle written by one of the Kursk’s doomed crewmen shortly before he died in the stricken nuclear submarine.

Prosecutor General Vladimir Ustinov said the message, written by one of the sailors whose body was retrieved last year, added no new information concerning the cause of the August 12, 2000 disaster and thus its contents would not be revealed to the public at large.

“The message is deeply personal, and I will not read it to you because it contains no information about what happened on the craft,” Ustinov said. “It was discovered in a mineral water bottle.”

NTV television identified the sailor as Andrei Borisov.

The crewman’s body had been recovered last year in the rear of the craft. According to another note found in the same section of the Kursk last year, some 23 men raced to the back of the vessel in a desperate rush to avoid a series of fatal explosions that shattered the submarine’s bow.

Rescue workers estimate that the men remained alive for at least six or eight hours before suffocating to death with the knowledge they were trapped inside with no hope of rescue, since the rear escape hatch was damaged and could not be unlocked.

The letter was discovered on Tuesday as workers removed another three bodies from the craft, with 52 of the 118 bodies now having have been pulled from the crippled vessel since it was brought into dry dock.

Out of these 52, 32 have been identified and 15 sent on by plane for burial by their relatives.

The total number of bodies recovered from the wreck, including 12 brought up by divers when the vessel was on the sea bed, stands at 64.

Investigators also detached five more of the Granit cruise missiles from the Kursk shortly after recovering a key recording device that could reveal the mystery of the disaster.

Recovery workers have now removed eight Granit missiles — all from the less-damaged port side of the vessel — of the 22 attached to the Kursk when it joined the ill-fated Barents Sea military exercises in August 2000.

Officials said that salvage workers would continue to search for bodies until all hope was lost that any more of the crew could be found, adding that it seems that commanders knew the Kursk was in mortal danger moments after the initial explosion.

“I think that before the second explosion the order was given aboard the Kursk to evacuate the first four compartments,” as investigators had discovered more bodies in the craft’s mid-section than should have been found there in ordinary circumstances, said Russian navy commander Vladimir Kuroyedov.

Russian officials have put forward a number of theories as to what sparked the initial explosions on the Kursk, most now agreeing that one of the torpedoes in the craft’s bow blew up, setting off a fire and a second, fatal blast that was registered as far away as Scotland.

Recovery workers had earlier said that the true cause may not be known until the bow — which was sliced off and left on the seabed at the start of the Kursk raising operation — is itself recovered some time next year.

But they were given a boost by news that investigators have located the nautical equivalent of a “black box” from the wreck of the Kursk.

The apparatus, which registers technical data associated with navigation, much like the flight recorder on an aircraft, was found late Monday in the vessel’s fifth compartment, legal investigator Artur Yeguyev told AFP.

“The recording, which is on paper, has been extracted from it and it is in perfect condition. We think it will help us to establish the real causes of the catastrophe,” he said.—AFP