Amur shipbuilders ask Putin to control Nerpa submarine tragedy case
VLADIVOSTOK. Aug 16 (Interfax) - The Submariners' Club of the Amur shipyard in Komsomolsk-on-Amur has asked Russian President Vladimir Putin to assist the identification of culprits of the death of 20 members of the Nerpa nuclear submarine's trial crew in the Sea of Japan (the East Sea) in November 2008.
The Vladivostok Pacific Fleet Military Court will begin a new trial on August 17, and a jury will be formed. Nerpa commander Dmitry Lavrentyev and sailor Dmitry Grobov will be the prisoners in the dock.
"We, members of the Submariners' Club of the Amur shipyard, have built nuclear submarines of various projects and served on them. We know Pacific Fleet sailors, and we have spent many days together under the sea. We simply cannot understand why a new show is being staged with the only goal of sending the Nerpa commander to prison," says a three-page open letter to the president, whose copy Interfax has received.
"There are still no results" in three years of the investigation, the submariners said.
"As if there were no Molibden-I control system designed by the Avrora Research and Production Company, which had self-induced starts many times. The rascals, who supplied an extinguisher with poisonous tetrachloroethylene, vanished into the thin air," the letter says.
"Nether the military prosecutor's office of the Pacific Fleet nor the Federal Security Service could or, probably wanted to solve the case, whose details were clarified by housewives comprising the jury [in the first trial] when Lavrentyev and Grobov were acquitted," the letter says.
The Komsomolsk-on-Amur police are searching for the suppliers of the submarine's extinguisher. The submariners think that must be done by the Federal Security Service.
"It is hard to understand the description of the delivery of poisonous extinguisher to a nuclear submarine as banal fraud. The Nerpa case is a blunt case of sabotage of state interests and a strategic object, which the Nerpa nuclear submarine is. That must be investigated by the Federal Security Service," the letter stresses.
Submariners' Club member Anatoly Vasilenko said they asked Putin to take under control the search for the tragedy culprits.
"We ask Vladimir Vladimirovich to control the case and to order an investigation. It is necessary to hold a new investigation and to involve the Federal Security Service into it," Vasilenko said.
