Kursk victims 'may not be recovered'

SEVEROMORSK, Russia -- Divers may be unable to retrieve the bodies of all 23 sailors thought to have survived the explosion that sunk the Russian submarine Kursk, a senior navy commander said on Friday.

Northern Fleet commander Admiral Vyacheslav Popov said bad weather in the Barents Sea was hampering the retrieval operation.

He also said he believed sailors who scrambled to the submarine's rear section -- compartment nine -- after the explosions, would have survived no longer than 24 hours.

All 118 crew members died when the Kursk sank on August 12 after two explosions ripped through it.

Popov, speaking to reporters in the Arctic port of Severomorsk, said a storm was hampering the divers' efforts and left little hope for resumption before late Saturday.

VIDEO CNN's Steve Harrigan reports the latest on the effort to recover the bodies from their watery graves (October 27) Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media) Video of the recovery effort Play video (QuickTime, Real or Windows Media)     AUDIO Russian Navy chief Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov announces that a note was found 414kb/38 sec. WAV sound

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"I personally forecast that we will not be able to retrieve all 23 bodies from section nine," Popov said.

A letter found on one of four bodies retrieved this week showed that at least 23 men survived the initial explosion.

Lieutenant-Captain Dmitry Kolesnikov, who wrote the letter, said crew members from sections six, seven and eight scrambled to the rear electrical motors compartment.

"Only experts can show how long the crew survived in the aft section. As a submarine officer I can only suggest that the crew died on August 13 at the latest," Popov said. "Most likely the crew died because of a lack of oxygen."

Russian officials had long insisted that all the crew had died within a minute or two of the accident, the cause of which remains unknown.

Popov said divers who had entered section nine found passages blocked by boxes of equipment and other objects.

The discovery of Kolesnikov's letter revived public outrage over initial efforts to rescue the submarine's crew and cast fresh doubt on official versions of the sinking of the Kursk, post-Soviet Russia's worst naval disaster.

Official reports said the navy did not lose contact with the submarine until 11:30 p.m. that evening, hours after Russia's Navy Commander Vladimir Kuroyedov and other officials said Kolesnikov had finished writing his note.

The Russian navy only announced it had lost contact with the submarine two days after the accident, initially saying the Kursk had technical faults and the crew were fine.

"The Kursk crew has been buried alive," Veronika Marchenko, head of the anti-military association Mother's Right, said in a statement issued Friday.

"The government was trying to solve all possible problems, such as concealing the tragedy, protecting military secrets, raising the plummeting popularity of the president, paying off too persistent relatives or hushing up honest journalists. All except one -- acting quickly to save the crew."

"We should think what to do to make the government value citizens' lives more than oil, military secrets or its own prestige."

Russian President Vladimir Putin faced a barrage of criticism for his hands-off handling of the crisis in the early days. He told senior officials on Thursday that the operation to recover bodies would continue.

After the Kursk sank, Russian submersibles were unable to latch onto the hatch, and the cash-strapped navy didn't have deep-sea divers who could enter the submarine.

When Norwegian divers were finally invited to perform the work, four days after the sinking, they did it within hours.

The Russian newspaper Segodnya said that Kolesnikov's note was "deadly for the government."

"The authorities buried the Kursk too early, maybe even when it was still alive," it said.

Kolesnikov's note gave no indication of whether any of the crew had survived beyond a few hours. At least some of the 23 were injured and the compartment showed signs of fire, said Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedov, the Russian naval chief.

Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov quickly ruled out on Thursday any prospects that crew members could have been saved.

The Associated Press & Reuters contributed to this report.

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