Argentina boosts search for missing submarine

BUENOS AIRES: Argentina says it’s accelerating the search for a submarine that has been lost in the South Atlantic for eight days amid growing fears for its 44 crew members.

The navy says an explosion occurred near the time and place where the submarine went missing on Nov.15. That’s led some to give up hope.

But spokesman Enrique Balbi said on Friday that the international search continues. He said Russia is sending an Antonov transport aircraft. And a ship is being adapted in the southern Patagonian port of Comodoro Rivadavia to carry a US Navy submarine rescue chamber to the area.

Hopes diminished because San Juan only had a seven-day supply of oxygen.

ARGENTINE navy oficials worry that even if the ARA San Juan is intact but submerged, its crew may be running out of oxygen.

Crew members’ relatives who had been waiting for news at the submarine’s base in the city of Mar del Plata started going home late on Thursday.

“At this point, the truth is I have no hope that they will come back,” Maria Villareal, mother of one crew member, told local television on Friday morning.

Some family members accused the navy of putting their loved ones at unnecessary risk by sending them out in a more than 30-year-old vessel that they suspected was not properly maintained, an accusation the navy has denied.

“They killed my brother,” a man leaving the base in a car shouted out to reporters. The older man driving the car was crying.

“They did not tell us they were dead, but that is the logical conclusion,” Itati Leguizamon, wife of one of the missing crew members, told reporters.

A sound detected underwater on the morning of Nov. 15, around the time the San Juan sent its last signal and in the same area, was “consistent with an explosion,” navy spokesman Enrique Balbi said on Thursday.

The information about the possible explosion came from the Comprehensive Nuclear Test-ban Treaty Organization, an international body that runs a global network of listening posts designed to check for secret atomic blasts.

San Juan was launched in 1983 and underwent maintenance in 2008 in Argentina.

The armed forces have had to face dwindling resources and lack of training since the end of a military dictatorship in the early 1980s.