Foreign-Aided Rescue Efforts Continue, Hope Dim

British and Norwegian rescuers joined their Russian counterparts late Saturday in efforts to rescue the Kursk nuclear submarine that has been stranded at the bottom of the Barents Sea for a week.

Reports from the northern port city of Murmansk, where the rescue efforts were headquartered, said Norwegian divers with video equipment have started to descend to Kursk Sunday morning in a final bid to find possible survivors aboard.

However, Russian officials said Saturday that all 118 submariners were probably dead.

The Norwegian and British teams were brought to the disaster site by two Norwegian ships which moved into position above the mangled Kursk before dawn.

The divers, working at a depth of about 100 meters, would assess the damage suffered by the submarine when it sank August 12, a task that would take "several hours," a spokesman for the British Defense Ministry said.

According to Russian reports, the divers would try to manually unscrew a lid leading to the sub's escape chamber. Pressure-measuring devices located inside the hatch would give the rescue team an idea about conditions inside the Kursk.

Pressure within the vessel must be low enough to provide for survival. The divers would also assess chances for the British mini-submarine to latch on to the damaged escape hatch.

The Russian Navy announced Saturday that most of the crew apparently died when a massive explosion shattered the Kursk on August 12, slamming it to the bottom of the sea. The authorities said most of the Kursk's crew apparently died in the first minutes of the disaster, and that any survivors likely drowned as the ship filled with water.

"Most possibly, we will have to admit that our worst expectations have materialized," Vice Admiral Mikhail Motsak, chief of the Northern Fleet, told a special program on RTR television in the starkest statement so far.

Russian rescuers continued struggling to reach the submarine, but were hampered by powerful currents and near-zero visibility on the seabed.

The escape hatch they were trying to reach at the rear of the submarine is badly damaged, and repeated efforts to dock have failed.

There is still no final word on what caused the accident, but Motsak, the chief of the Northern Fleet, said there were three possible versions.

The first is a powerful dynamic blow that may have occurred on collision with another object.

Motsak said three foreign submarines were spotted in the accident zone, which is an area under constant observation by foreign intelligence services.

He said the Kursk's collision detonated three or four torpedoes, resulting in a blast equivalent to 1-2 ton of TNT.

The second is an explosion inside the submarine with subsequent flooding of the sub's first and second compartments.

And the third possible cause is that the Kursk hit a World War II mine, the admiral said. The final suggestion should not be completely discarded since six such mines have been discovered in that part of the Barents Sea over the last few years, he added.

Russian Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov, who heads a government commission probing the causes of the accident, said the crewmembers in the first, second and possibly several subsequent compartments of the submarine died instantly when the Kursk struck the seabed Saturday.

However, Klebanov said that there is still a chance that some sailors may still be alive in the eighth and ninth sections, but that this chance is more of a theoretical nature, Interfax reported.

As the nation and the world pray for the sailors aboard the Kursk, the relatives of the submariners are having an especially hard time. The government has allocated funds to help those that have arrived at Murmansk and other places near the accident site.

In one moving episode, the director of a train bound for Murmansk turned off the speakers of a carriage that housed the relatives of the Kursk crew -- to stop them from hearing radio broadcast of comments from military officials that the submariners' chance of survival was almost zero.

Across the country, donations are being collected for the relatives and religious ceremonies held to pray for the crew's safe return.



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