Russia vows to rescue sub crew

2:30 PM

MURMANSK - Russian efforts to rescue the crew of a submarine trapped under Arctic waters were set to move up a gear today.

Friday was initially named by rescuers as the day when oxygen would run out for the 118 crew aboard the nuclear-powered Kursk, though navy chief Vladimir Kuroyedov later said the air supply might last into next week.

With rescue submersibles from Britain and Norway due to arrive at the scene on Saturday and media slamming President Vladimir Putin for a hands-off approach to the crisis, officials vowed to keep up efforts to save whoever might still be alive.

"Inceasing efforts to get the crew out...will continue," Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who heads a government crisis centre, told a news conference in Murmansk.

As he spoke, rescuers lowered in turn four manned capsules into the murky waters of the Barents Sea, trying to latch them onto the heavily listing submarine.

So far, all their attempts have been in vain with the rescue vehicles sliding off the craft which has been slowly burying itself deeper into the sand.

Inspection of the front end of the submarine has revealed extensive damage to the bow which Klebanov said might have been the result of a collision with some yet unknown heavy object.

"There was a huge blow to the right of the submarine's nose and it seems as though it was a collision with some object of large tonnage," he said.

Klebanov said many of the crew, who had been hammering SOS signals on the hull of the submarine until Wednesday when all communications with them were lost, were in the front section of the submarine ripped open by the collision.

His words seemed to confirm media reports that some of the crew might have died in last Saturday's crash.

The last hope for the surviving crew could be a British state-of-the-art rescue craft which Moscow reluctantly agreed to make use of on Wednesday after four days of polite rejection of London's repeated help offers.

The British team, seconded by Norwegian colleagues, raced against time to ship the mini-sub to the disaster area for a last-ditch attempt to pluck the Russians from the stricken craft.

"All we want to do is to get into position and do our level best to rescue them," said the British navy's submarine rescue Commander Alan Hoskins, aboard the Normand Pioneer mother ship carrying the small LR5 submarine to the site of the crash.

The British mission will not be there until Saturday but Hoskins said the team had been given one glimmer of hope - news that the hatches on the stricken Kursk submarine are compatible with those on the British rescue vessel.

However, a Russian RTR television correspondent, broadcasting live from a Russian warship hosting the rescue operation headquarters, said the issue of the compatibility of the two craft remained open.

The unfolding Kursk drama was also quickly turning into a political crisis for President Vladimir Putin whose stance seemed to shock Russian and world media.

Having left for the southern seaside resort town of Sochi on the day the disaster struck in the Arctic, Putin remained conspicuously silent throughout the crisis.

He briefly appeared on television in shirtsleeves on Wednesday along with other senior officials to say that the situation was critical and that all that needed being done was being done by the military.

"Those dying in the Barents Sea did not cause our statesmen to interrupt their summer holidays," said the daily Izvestia in an early copy of its Friday's edition.

Its comments echoed the outcry of many media which savaged Putin for not addressing the nation, returning to Moscow and personally taking the rescue operation in hand to galvanise sluggish generals into action.

- REUTERS

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