Missing Argentine Submarine ARA San Juan Disaster Was Covered Up, Crew Member’s Father Says

The father of a crew member on board missing Argentine submarine the ARA San Juan said he believed there were lies and deception involved in the disaster. Luis Tagliapietra, the father of Alejandro Damian, told the U.K.’s The Times things were hidden in the wake of the submarine’s disappearance.

The ARA San Juan and its 44 crew members vanished Nov. 15. Since then, despite a multinational search of hundreds of thousands of nautical miles, no trace of the vessel has been discovered.

“Why does the navy hide things [from us]?” Tagliapietra told The Times. “Something very serious must have happened for so many lies to be told and for the total lack of effort to find it.”

It remained unclear just what happened to the submarine. The vessel’s commander reported a battery failure shortly before it disappeared, though another contact was made to say the submarine was continuing on using alternate batteries. Shortly after last contact, a sound consistent with an explosion was detected by sonar.

Just days ago, Argentine authorities raided naval headquarters as part of its investigation into the submarine’s disappearance, according to Deutsche Wells. Officials also raided facilities of German industrial contractor Ferrostaal after reports alleged Ferrostaal and battery maker EnerSys-Hawker may have paid bribes to receive a $6 million contract to replace the ARA San Juan’s battery cells in 2011.

“There is a suspicion that the batteries that have been replaced were partly or not of the quality that they should have [been],” Cornelia Schmidt-Liermann, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Argentine Parliament, told German public radio outlet BR. “We also do not know where they came from, Germany or any other country, so we want to know what technicians were there and those who signed.”

Argentine’s naval chief Admiral Marcelo Srur was terminated from his position in the wake of the submarine’s disappearance. Srur was appointed by President Mauricio Macri in 2016 and was the fifth senior officer to be removed from his post amid the investigation into the ARA San Juan, The Telegraph reported.

Tagliapietra’s claims are not the first accusations leveled against Argentine officials by the family members of those on board. Some said the submarine was not in condition to sail. The wife of one crew member alleged the military “sent a piece of crap to sail.” After Argentine authorities officially called off the rescue mission in late November, families railed against the decision and staged a protest near a naval base.

“They killed my brother, the bastards,” one man whose brother was on the submarine told the Clarin newspaper, according to BBC News. “They killed my brother because they take him out to sail [in a vessel held together] with wire.”

The navy denied allegations of unsafe conditions on the vessel and said the submarine underwent a routine inspection before being sent to sea in November. And while the search for the ARA San Juan continued, authorities said they believed all those on board perished in an explosion.