MOSCOW — Navigating through murky, Arctic waters inside the sunken Kursk nuclear submarine, Russian divers at times relied solely on their sense of touch to search for bodies, a diver said in an interview published Tuesday.
The water inside the vessel was so thick with silt and mangled machinery that the divers' headlamps were sometimes of no help, diver Yuri Gusev told the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily.
Gusev returned to Russia on Monday after an 18-day Russian-Norwegian operation to recover remains of the 118 sailors killed when the Kursk sank in the Barents Sea on Aug. 12. Twelve bodies, two notes written by sailors and some ship documentation were recovered before the effort was called off last week because of rough weather and danger to the divers.
As preparation for the risky, grim operation, Gusev said the divers spent time at a morgue and had special courses at the Medical Academy in St. Petersburg.
Once under water, because of the low visibility, he said, "there were times when (we searched) by feel."
The Russian commander of the recovery operation, Rear Adm. Gennady Verich, told Komsomolskaya Pravda that he dismissed advice from the Norwegians that the divers shouldn't look in the face of the victims for psychological reasons.
"Sometimes they had to work for two hours with one body to pull it out. If a diver was afraid to look at the face, was afraid to touch it, he wouldn't have been able to get the job done," Verich said.
Gusev said the divers found the main escape capsule in the front of the submarine intact. But Russian officials say damage to the bow was sudden and severe, indicating that none of the sailors there survived long enough to try to reach the hatch, and sailors in the rear couldn't have reached the capsule because of destroyed equipment blocking the way.
The divers would not comment on the cause. Russian officials say it could have been a collision with a foreign vessel, or an explosion in the torpedo compartment.
Despite the strain of the operation, Gusev said he would do it again if asked. But he was reluctant to talk of the emotional side.
"I will probably not tell anyone about it. The only thing is that it's too bad we couldn't retrieve everyone. I want to ask forgiveness of the relatives of those killed," Gusev told the newspaper.
Another Russian diver, Sergei Shmygin, embraced his wife and young son upon his arrival in St. Petersburg.
"It's very hard for me to evaluate and talk about the operation. It's all in my heart, and my wife and child are next to me now and I don't want to recall it," Komsomolskaya Pravda quoted him as saying. "You understand, it's not as if we were searching for gold down there."