Submarine found year after disappearance

The wreckage of an Argentine navy submarine that exploded and disappeared a year ago was located in the Atlantic Ocean Friday, the navy said, crushing any remaining hope for relatives of the 44 crew. There has been “positive identification of the ARA San Juan,” at a depth of 800 meters (2,600 feet), the navy said on Twitter.

The Seabed Constructor, a vessel owned by US search firm Ocean Infinity, made the discovery. It had set out in September on the latest attempt to find the San Juan, whose disappearance cost the Navy's top officer his job. The navy lost contact with the San Juan on November 15 last year, about 450 kilometres (280 miles) from the Argentine coast while it travelled northward from the country’s southern tip.

“I still had hopes that they could be alive,” Luis Niz, the father of a missing sailor, told reporters, even though President Mauricio Macri’s government had already declared there were no survivors. “We are with the other relatives. They are going to show us the photos. They say that our youngsters are inside,” said Yolanda Mendiola, the mother of crewman Leandro Cisneros, 28. “We are all destroyed here.”

The discovery came the day after a ceremony, which Macri attended, at the San Juan’s Mar del Plata base on the first anniversary of its disappearance. It also came just before the Seabed Constructor was to leave for maintenance in South Africa. Before setting off, the searchers decided to check an area which bad weather had previously prevented them from examining. They “decided to do a new search and, thanks to God, it was able to find the zone,” navy spokesman Rodolfo Ramallo told Todo Noticias TV. “Now another chapter opens.

From the analysis of the state in which the submarine has been found, we will see how to proceed,” he said. The ‘last’ chance The Seabed Constructor is equipped with cameras that can be submerged to a depth of 6,000 meters (6,500 yards). It was to receive a reward of $7.5 million if it found the missing sub. The loss of the San Juan was one of the world’s worst submarine disasters in decades, and the first major tragedy to hit Argentina’s navy since the Falklands War in 1982.

Argentina, which refers to the islands as Las Malvinas, lost the war to Britain. Argentina’s navy has been fiercely criticized for its handling of the case since first reporting the submarine overdue at Mar del Plata on November 16, 2017.