The seven crewmen of a stranded Russian mini-submarine were cut free by a British robot craft and brought to the surface alive Sunday after a 76-hour ordeal off the far eastern Kamchatka peninsula, dpa reported. "The crew opened the hatch itself, came out on the surface and went onto the rescue vessel Alages where they are receiving medical assistance," Pacific Fleet Commander Viktor Fyodorov said. Exhausted by their incarceration, the six sailors and a civil engineer then set sail on a rocket cruiser with Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov to Kamchatka's capital Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky. The unmanned "Scorpio" robot used cutting tools to sever steel cables of a sonar coastal detection device that got entangled with the AS-28 mini-submarine 190 metres deep off Russia's Pacific coast. The 55-ton submersible bobbed to the surface around 0430 GMT, 17 hours before the navy said its oxygen reserves would run out. The British defence ministry craft arrived in the area by plane Saturday together with U.S. "Super Scorpio" robot diving units sent from California to help the rescue attempt by the Russian navy, which did not have deep-sea equipment available. On Saturday, Russian engineers looped metal hawsers around the 13.5-metre-long vessel in a failed attempt to raise it from a snare of cables to around 60 metres so that divers could reach the men. --more 1024 Local Time 0724 GMT
