MONUMENT UNVEILED ON ANNIVERSARY OF KURSK DISASTER

This article is from LewesLinks.org.

On 12 August, three years after 118 sailors perished on the sunken nuclear submarine Kursk, friends and relatives of many of the dead gathered at a St. Petersburg cemetery to unveil a monument to them -- a black granite cube carved with waves symbolised the ocean depths, and at the top a storm petrel, the little bird that symbolises trouble. Thirty-two of the sailors, including Kursk captain Gennady Lyachin, are buried at St. Petersburg's Serafimov cemetery. City and navy officials joined relatives in laying flowers at the monument, which is inscribed with the words "Don't despair!" - a quote from a letter written by Lieut. Dmitry Kolesnikov after the explosion, while many of the sailors were still alive and waiting for a rescue that did not come.

Afterward, relatives gathered around the graves of their loved ones. "It will never get easier to cope with what has happened," said Svetlana Baigarina, as she stood with her family at the grave of her husband, Murat Baigarin. "You can imagine how hard it can be when a woman has two sons who need a father so much." She said she was not satisfied with the official investigation into the disaster, which ended in July 2002, concluding that no one was to blame for the accidental explosion of a practice torpedo and that none of the trapped sailors could have been saved, even if the navy had reacted more quickly.

A Moscow lawyer representing about 40 families of Kursk sailors has been pushing for the investigation to be reopened. But Irina Lyachina, widow of the submarine's captain, said she was against a new investigation." The government and all the people who were in charge of the investigation have done everything they could."

The fact that there wasn't a rescue attempt for the crewmembers who survived the initial explosion is outrageous. I will always feel disgusted.