South Korea hoists sunken warship with 44 missing sailors believed trapped inside

South Korea hoists sunken warship; dead reported

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korea lifted part of a warship from the sea Thursday, nearly three weeks after it mysteriously exploded and sank with dozens of sailors trapped inside. Salvage workers reportedly found many dead bodies in the retrieved vessel.

Fifty-eight crew members were rescued shortly after the 1,200-ton Cheonan split into two after exploding March 26 during a routine patrol near the tense border with North Korea. Divers have recovered two bodies but 44 other crew members are unaccounted for.

On Thursday, a huge naval crane hoisted the stern — where most of the missing sailors are believed trapped — a day after divers succeeded in tying the wreckage with chains.

Rescuers and salvage workers who boarded the stern to pump out water saw “many” dead bodies, Yonhap news agency reported, citing a military official it didn’t identify.

South Korea’s Joint Chiefs of Staff said that only one unidentified body was confirmed found inside the stern Thursday.

Footage by TV broadcaster SBS showed the stern being loaded onto a barge after it was hoisted about 10 to 13 feet (3 to 4 meters) above the sea surface.

Salvage workers boarded the stern later Thursday to search for the missing crew. It was to be moved aboard the barge to a naval base to investigate the cause of the explosion while the rest of the ship is to be salvaged as early as next week, military officials said.

No cause has been determined. There has been some suspicion but no confirmation of North Korean involvement in the sinking, which occurred near the two Koreas’ disputed western sea border — a scene of three bloody inter-Korean naval battles.

South Korean officials have said they will look into all possibilities including that the ship might have been struck by a North Korean torpedo or a mine left over from the 1950-53 Korean War. The conflict ended with an armistice, not a peace treaty, thus leaving the Koreas still technically at war.

North Korean officials have reportedly denied their country’s involvement in the blast. Last week, the Dong-a Ilbo newspaper in Seoul reported that North Korea military delegates told Chinese officials during their trip to Beijing that Pyongyang was not behind the ship’s explosion.

To ascertain whether North Korea was involved, authorities would have to look at the shape of broken ship parts and recover splinters of a torpedo or a sea mine and determine whether the North had such weapons, said Lee Hyun-yup, a marine engineering expert at Chungnam National University in South Korea. It could take years to find the exact cause, he said.

The sinking was one of South Korea’s worst naval disasters. In 1974, a ship sank off the southeast coast in stormy weather, killing 159 sailors and coast guard personnel. In 1967, 39 sailors were killed by North Korean artillery.

South Korea has asked the U.S., Australia, the Britain and Sweden to send experts for a joint investigation. A team of eight U.S. investigators, led by Rear Admiral Thomas J. Eccles, arrived in South Korea earlier this week, according to South Korea’s Defense Ministry.

Bad weather and heavy seas have impeded efforts to locate the 44 missing crew and salvage the wreckage of the Cheonan.