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BUENOS AIRES – An Argentine military submarine was found deep in the Atlantic Ocean almost a year after his disappearance with 44 crew members on board, the Argentine Navy announced Saturday.
The submarine, the San Juan, was located nearly 2,600 feet below the surface of the ocean by a private company that the government had hired after a search involving more than a dozen countries, which had disappeared on November 15 2017.
The announcement came in a tweet: "There was a positive identification of #AraSanJuan."
Rodolfo Ramallo, a spokesman for the Navy, said the discovery of San Juan "closes one chapter and opens another."
"Depending on the condition of the submarine, we will have to determine what happened," he said.
The submarine disappeared during a routine trip from Ushuaia to the Patagonia region of Mar del Plata in the province of Buenos Aires. Eight days later – in the middle of recovery operations covering 186,000 square kilometers – the navy announced that an explosion had been recorded near the last known submarine location, only hours after its last communication with the army. .
The explosion was only revealed after US government analysts and a the International Comptroller of Nuclear Weapons has detected it and informed the Argentineans Ships from the United States, Britain, Brazil, Chile and Russia, among others, have swept the seas in the framework of research.
On Saturday, it was unclear whether the military would be able to resurface the San Juan. Otherwise, the navy could use images to analyze the ship and get answers about her disappearance.
"We have to see if it's complete or it's divided, and from there we can do the necessary analysis," Ramallo said.
The San Juan was found by Ocean Infinity, a Houston-based company known for its efforts to locate Flight 370 of Malaysia Airlines, which disappeared over the Indian Ocean in 2014.
The mystery surrounding the fate of the crew aboard the San Juan, a German-made submarine that has been part of the Argentine fleet since 1985, has transformed the country.
"This has turned into a big family and we all help each other through this difficult time," said María Morales, 51, mother of a crew member, Luís García, at the moment of the disappearance.
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