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Thursday, April 5, 2001

Grigorij Tjomtsjin, a member of a Russian commission investigating the accident aboard the atomic-powered vessel, told the station "yes, there were" when asked if it had nuclear weapons on board.

"They are no danger," he added, according to a translation of his remarks from Russian.

The Kursk sank after an unexplained accident during a military exercise in the Barents Sea last August, with the loss of all 118 of its crew. Twelve of the dead have since been recovered from the wreck. Tests in the water around the submarine have shown no unusual levels of radioactivity.

The Russian authorities have repeatedly denied there were nuclear weapons aboard.

Last night the Norwegian nuclear watchdog Bellona, which first highlighted the scale of the dumping of nuclear waste around Russian submarine bases near Murmansk, also distanced itself from the television report.

It pointed out that there may be a commercial interest in raising the possibility of nuclear weapons on board, when a complicated salvage operation was involved.

Harald Ramfjord of Global Tool Management, a company working on plans to raise the Kursk, also claimed to have seen evidence of atomic missiles aboard.

"One of the documents I had access to indicated that there were two atomic missiles aboard the vessel," he told TV2, adding that the Russian documents were stamped "secret."

A Norwegian foreign ministry spokesman, Karsten Klepsvik, said the ministry had asked its embassy in Moscow to investigate the report.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2001

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