In August this Twitter account (held to be credible by many)
I mentioned this previously. Sutton is taking a risk by posting this simply because he has some degree of "credibility". It will allow the news to spread without proper vetting.
The said
secret UK report is claimed by the
Daily Mail, and god knows where they got it from.
If a major incident did happen with one of China's few nuclear submarines, i would expect:
1) PLAN scrambling rescue assets in the region
2) Declaration of restrictions, notice to mariners not to access the area
3) USN, ROKN (since it is reportedly at the Yellow Sea) having multiples surveillance flights, naval assets in the area to see what's going on.
I don't see any of these three during that period.
Going back to the Daily Mail article, I see some areas which looks off:
Our understanding is death caused by hypoxia due to a system fault on the submarine. The submarine hit a chain and anchor obstacle used by the Chinese Navy to trap US and allied submarines. 'This resulted in systems failures that took six hours to repair and surface the vessel. The onboard oxygen system poisoned the crew after a catastrophic failure.'
If they were trapped on the net system and the submarine's batteries were running flat (plausible) then eventually the air purifiers and air treatment systems could have failed.
The report says it is a nuclear submarine. Short of a reactor failure, why would they be running on batteries?
The chain and anchor obstacle point looks weird. At best, such an obstacle will entangle the props. That shouldn't be enough to remotely affect the power plant. Two, I am not sure how such an obstacle could possible work without being directly anchored to the sea floor, which means if it did happen, they should be in fairly shallow waters. It's hard to imagine how a rescue cannot be attempted and there are no CO2/carbon monoxide detectors onboard.
I'm not completely discounting that something might have happened, but it is an extraordinary claim that needs a lot of explaining.
EXCLUSIVE Officially, China has denied the incident took place. It also appears Beijing refused to request international assistance for its stricken submarine.
www.dailymail.co.uk
