Russia Denies Missile Hit Sub

B E R L I N, Sept. 8, 2000 -- Russian officials are hotly denying that a government investigation had concluded that the Kursk nuclear submarine was sunk by a missile fired by a Russian ship.

The Federal Security Service would not comment on the report, published today in Germany’s Berliner Zeitung. But spokesmen for both the Russian navy and the special commission investigating the Kursk disaster adamantly denied it.

“This is nonsense. Cruisers never carry real warheads, only training weapons, during military exercises,” said Oksana Onishchenko, the spokeswoman for the special commission head,Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov.

Naval spokesman Igor Dygalo also denied the possibility, the Interfax news agency reported.

“In the process of exercises such an accident is strictly excluded because surface ships and submarines operate within strictly defined training zones,” Interfax news agency quotedhim as saying.

Dygalo also said that ships and submarines never fire live ammunition during training.

Part of a Military Exercise?

According to the Berliner Zeitung report, Russia’s Federal Security Service concluded that the Kursk was hit by a new anti-submarine rocket fired by a nuclear-powered cruiser, the Peter the Great.

Both vessels were taking part in naval exercises in the Barents Sea that had been going on since Aug. 2. The Kursk sank on Aug. 12, eventually killing all 118 men on board.

The Berliner Zeitung said the Peter the Great had fired a “Granit” rocket armed with a new target-seeking warhead and that the missile traveled 12 miles underwater.

The report cited in the newspaper, put together by a special investigating team under FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev, said shortly after the missile was fired two underwater explosions were registered, both visible from the bridge of the Peter the Great — flagship of the Russian Northern Fleet.

Those on the ship apparently assumed that the second blast was part of the maneuver. The Kursk was later determined to have been within 1,312 feet of the rocket, the reportsaid.

The German newspaper said the navy had been simulating a nuclear attack on Russia on August 12 and wanted to test the Granit cruise missile under the most realistic conditionspossible. The Granit is called “Shipwreck” by NATO. The samekind of missile was carried aboard the Kursk.

The report did not say why the missile had hit the Kursk,but the newspaper said it could have been an error in a newweapons system or that the Kursk was not recognized as afriendly craft.

The newspaper said that both the head of the Northern Fleet, Admiral Vyacheslav Popov, and its chief of staff, Vice-Admiral Mikhail Motsak, had been on board the Peter the Great on Aug. 12, theday of the accident.

Heard it Before

It was not clear whether the FSB investigation mentioned by the newspaper was linked to an inquiry conducted by the government and navy under Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov.

The scenario was among about a half-dozen theories advanced in the Russian media after the Kursk sank. But Onishchenko said Klebanov’s commission had never even considered it.

Russian officials have suggested that a collision with a foreign submarine was the most likely cause of the disaster. A senior Russian general reiterated this in an interview in the latest edition of the weekly military newspaper Nezavisimoye Voyennoye Obozreniye.

“Statistics point to the likelihood of such a collision,” Colonel-General Valery Manilov said, noting there had been 11 recorded incidents of this kind between 1967 and 2000, including eight in Northern Fleet waters.

The Pentagon said on Thursday that acoustic information gathered by a U.S. submarine on Aug. 12 showed that a major explosion believed to be equivalent to between one and five tonsof TNT explosive had ripped through the Kursk.

The explosion led to the almost immediate flooding of theship, a Defense Department spokesman said.

The spokesman denied there had been a collision with anAmerican or allied submarine or other vessel and said there wasstill some speculation among American naval experts that a newtype of liquid-fuel torpedo was aboard the Kursk.

The Berliner Zeitung said the report was handed to President Vladimir Putin on Aug. 31.

Citing unnamed sources in Moscow, the newspaper said that Putin wanted to pursue the report after his return from the United Nations Millennium Summit in New York because of itssensitive nature.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.