Perhaps the most dramatic television footage of the entire Kursk submarine drama has been that of a distraught mother of a victim apparently being forcibly sedated by an unsmiling woman medic with a hypodermic syringe. Russia's naval authorities now deny the incident ever happened.
"These claims are absurd. I'd be surprised if there had been an injection purely to keep her from talking," a navy spokesman, Mr Vladimir Navrotsky, told the AFP news agency. "Probably the woman was worked up by her emotions and because of the conditions in the crowded hall," he added.
The BBC in Moscow told The Irish Times last night that a local cameraman from Murmansk television identified the pictures as being genuine. He said they had been taken by him at a meeting between relatives of victims and the Deputy Prime Minister, Mr Ilya Klebanov.
Clearly overcome by grief, the woman was filmed as she shouted at the deputy prime minister. He has been leading the investigation into the submarine disaster.
In the incident caught on film a medical officer approached the woman from behind. She collapsed into the arms of medical officials a short while later. The incident has been widely broadcast in the Western media, notably by the BBC, with the implication that it represents a throwback to Soviet-era methods of repression of dissidents using drugs. A witness at the scene, Ms Yelena Alexeyevna, said there were many medical personnel at the meeting, but she had not seen an injection administered to the distraught woman. There was some mystery regarding the origins of the film, with all three local television stations contacted by AFP denying it was their cameramen who had filmed the incident. Russian television contacted in Moscow said they had not been offered the tape. The news editor of the Murmansk television station that employs Mr Alexander Klotok, the cameramen said by the BBC to have filmed the incident, denied Mr Klotok had shot the scenes in question. Mr Yuri Yerofeyev of Murman Television said the cameraman had told him he was elsewhere in the hall filming the woman from other angles, and had not seen the injection being administered.
Mr Klotok told the BBC the hall was full of naval officers to ensure order at the meeting and that he had been ordered to stop filming as soon as the woman collapsed.
In a separate development the KGB's successor agency, the FSB, was reported to have launched an investigation into the presence on the Kursk of two Dagestanis. The independent television station NTV quoted FSB chief, Mr Nikolai Patrushev, as saying yesterday that the men, a military officer and a civilian, worked for a Caspian Sea firm and were not official members of the crew. The men, Mr Mamed Gadzhiyev and Mr Arnold Borisov, worked for Dazdiesel, a torpedo manufacturing company, according to the Interfax news agency.
"We have been gathering intelligence on this subject since the very first day but we do not at the moment have any proof implicating them in the accident," NTV cited the FSB chief as saying.
Dagestan borders on Chechnya where separatists are engaged in a war with Russian federal forces for the second time in the past five years. Dagestanis, like the Chechens, are Muslims but they have little sympathy for the separatists and are, in the main, supporters of the Russian operation in Chechnya.
Although not officially connected with the Kursk tragedy the sudden announcement by President Putin of a major pay rise for the armed forces is being seen as a move to repair his popularity with the military.
Mr Putin has granted a 20 per cent increase to the armed force, police, interior ministry forces, tax police and customs officers, according to an announcement from the Kremlin yesterday evening. The increase is due to take effect from December 1st.
While wages in the Russian forces are extremely low, averaging about £40 a month, there is a huge military and police establishment. The pay rise could, therefore, feed inflation which has been under control since the collapse of the country's economy in August 1998.
