A former Russian admiral has claimed that a Nato vessel was probably to blame for the sinking of the Kursk nuclear submarine.
The pride of Russia’s Northern Fleet sank in the icy Barents Sea in 2000, killing all 118 people on board. The official cause was an explosion in its torpedo section during a training exercise. At a cost of $1 billion the 14,000-tonne submarine was designed to be unsinkable.
Vyacheslav Popov, who led the fleet from 1999 to 2001, said a Nato submarine had been tracking the Kursk before the disaster. He said it may have “got too close” to the Russian submarine during a storm.
Popov, 75, said that he was 90 per cent sure of the identity of the Nato submarine but
