Admiral Suchkov expected to be sentenced for sunk submarine

On Tuesday the Northern Fleet Military Court will return with a sentence on the criminal case regarding a sunken K-159 nuclear submarine.

Admiral Gennady Suchkov, who was removed from the post of the Commander of the Northern Fleet at the end of the last year, will be sentenced, a spokesman for the court reported.

In court on April 27, the state prosecutor asked the court to find Admiral Suchkov guilty of negligence that caused the death of people and sentence him to four years in an open prison and also to deprive him of the right to hold a commanding post for three years.

The admiral's lawyers asked the court to find him not guilty. In his final statement, the admiral said that he was not guilty "from the criminal point of view."

The court spokesman said that the materials of the case consisted of 29 volumes. Altogether 109 people were interrogated, including Commander-in-Chief of the Navy Vladimir Kuroyedov, officials from the Main Headquarters of the Navy and representatives of the Northern Fleet command.

Seven leading Russian scientists in the sphere of ship-building and military sciences gave expert testimony. The expert's reports were studied, recordings of conversations between Northern Fleet headquarters, the tugboat and the K-159 submarine were listened to, videos of the examination of the sunk nuclear submarine were reviewed and technological and other documents were studied.

The K-159 nuclear submarine was being towed to Polyarny, a town on the Kola Peninsula, for scrapping. The submarine's nuclear reactor was in a safe state and it contained no weapons. The submarine began to be towed using four pontoons on August 28. A storm broke the pontoons away from the submarine on August 30 three miles northwest of Kildin Island in the Barents Sea. The water is 170 meters deep in that location.

There were ten members of the line-handling crew on the submarine. Nine died and one was rescued.

The military court started hearings in connection with this criminal case of the sunken submarine on January 12.