St. Petersburg deciphers tape recordings from Kursk submarine

Specialists from the St. Petersburg Center of Vocal Technologies have completed the deciphering of tape recordings made on board the nuclear submarine Kursk. On Friday, the results will be handed over to Russia's Military Prosecutor-General's Office.

According to German Zubov of the Center of Vocal Technologies, the Prosecutor-General's Office will get 14 tapes with voices of the crew as recorded by the submarine's tape recorders.

Specialists from the Prosecutor-General's Office are expected to go on with their work on materials supplied by the Center of Vocal Technologies, namely with hundreds of pages of written text and dozens of CDs. According to Zubov, they will analyse the information and make their conclusions.

Zubov said the recordings were brought to the Center in January of 2002 in the form of separate fragments and tangled-up pieces of tape. The first thing the Center did was clean the tapes, dry them, glue the pieces together and arrange them into bobbins. Further on, the recordings were translated into a digital format.

Experts managed to record not just the sounds but also the noises, which will also be analysed by the Military Prosecutor-General's Office, added Zubov.

Some of the work on the tapes was done beforehand. In April of 2002, they provided the Military Prosecutor-General's Office with eight deciphered tapes as recorded by the tape recorders of the sunken submarine.