The Argentine navy has announced it will scale back the rescue mission for its submarine, the ARA San Juan, which has been missing since 15 November with 44 crew on board.
“Despite the magnitude of the effort made it has not been possible to locate the submarine,” navy captain Enrique Balbi said. “No one will be rescued.”
Balbi said that after extending the mission to “more than double the number of days than it would have been possible to rescue the crew”, the search for the submarine would be scaled back to the area where the submarine was thought to have vanished, in waters of up to 500 metres deep.
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“Relatives of the crew are bitter at the amount of misleading misinformation they received from the government in an apparent attempt to keep their hopes alive in the first few days after the submarine disappeared,” The Guardian says.
Several families have told local media that they are planning legal action against the Argentinian government, and one family member has already travelled to speak to the judge in charge of investigating the incident.
The submarine is thought to have broken up shortly after reporting a “short circuit” in the vessel’s batteries. “Water had entered the submarine’s snorkel, which can be used to take in air from above the surface when the submarine is submerged,” the BBC says.
The ARA San Juan was ordered back to port, before the Vienna-based Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty Organisation detected a “hydro-acoustic anomaly”, which the navy says could be the noise of the submarine imploding.
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