Buenos Aires, March 23 (NA) – This Monday, the Federal Oral Court of Río Gallegos resumed the hearings for the trial of the sinking of the ARA San Juan with the statements of witnesses proposed by the prosecution and the parties, from which an unsettling fact emerged: the submarine had not conducted technical trials of maximum speed and depth. According to what Noticias Argentinas was able to find out, Fabián Walter Krawinkel, a submariner who was head of Logistics and Planning until his retirement in 2019, testified to this version. The former naval captain commented that there were trials that could not be carried out: the tests of maximum depth and maximum speed. “It was something very hard,” he recalled, visibly affected, after indicating that he knew part of the crew. Pereyra speculated before the court that the submarine may have lost “control of depth” before the fatal outcome. “The key trials, which are those of maximum depth and maximum speed, were never carried out,” he stated before the court led by the judge. In this regard, he pointed out that the problem originated in a “fuse that had blown” and explained that “in a submarine, fires are usually electrical, due to the high density of electrical equipment on board.” Another witness, the submariner and mechanic Víctor Manuel Pereyra, recalled that he was commander between 2014 and 2015 when the ARA San Juan was being repaired in a workshop in Mar del Plata. As he emphasized, the tests of maximum depth and maximum speed are “two demanding tests that can only be carried out once all previous stages have been approved.” “Maximum speed is tested in a reserved area, where the fifth stage of the march is activated. When I took command, numerous sea trials were missing to reach that stage,” he recalled. “We do not know what happened to the ARA San Juan.”
