Russia's leaders hushed up details of a note written by a Kursk submarine officer explaining what caused the vessel to sink, the daily Izvestya on Friday cited several officers in the Northern Fleet saying.
The secret letter was one of two written by Dmitry Kolesnikov who lived for a matter of hours after the initial catastrophe sent the Kursk to the bottom of the Barents Sea on August 12, the officers, who asked to remain anonymous, told Izvestya.
Details of a first note written by Kolesnikov, whose body divers recovered from the Kursk's wreck on October 25, were released to the media, disproving earlier government pronouncements that all 118 crew had died instantly.
In the second note, Kolesnikov not only describes how he took command of the stricken vessel following the death of the captain and other senior officers, but also explains what sank the Kursk, the sources said, without giving any details.
However, Deputy Prime Minister Ilya Klebanov denied Friday that any documents containing information about what caused the Kursk catastrophe had been found during an 18-day salvage operation that was abandoned earlier this week, Interfax reported.
A team of Russian and Norwegian divers managed to recover only 12 bodies from the wrecked craft before bad weather and the hazards posed by mangled equipment inside the sub forced them to stop.
Meanwhile, the Northern Fleet told AFP on Friday that it did not know of the existence of a second note found on Kolesnikov's body and outlining the causes of the disaster.
The sailor's posthumous revelation that 23 submariners at the rear of the Kursk had lived for several agonizing hours after the mysterious accident revived Russians' collective grief when Kolesnikov's note was discovered last month.
Another handwritten note discovered at the rear of the submarine, but giving no details of what caused the Kursk to sink, was made public by the Russian authorities on Wednesday.
Igor Spassky, head of the submarine designers Rubin, told Interfax on Friday that the Russian military's chief prosecutor had yet to establish with 100 percent accuracy the identity of the person who wrote the second note.
The Russian navy has still not published its official report into the cause of the tragedy, but the authorities continue to favor the theory that the Kursk collided with a foreign submarine.
Other theories suggest the submarine hit a World War II submarine or sank after a freak explosion in one of its missile compartments.
The international operation to lift the nuclear submarine to the surface has been tentatively scheduled for July or August next year, Spassky told a news conference in Saint Petersburg on Friday, Interfax reported -- MOSCOW (AFP)
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