* A film that may hold vital clues to the mystery surrounding the worst disaster in the Baltic Sea in modern times, the shipwreck of the passenger ferry Estonia, has vanished.
"We don't have a clue about its whereabouts. This is deeply regrettable," Johan Franson, chief of Sweden's Shipping Inspectorate, told Swedish magazine Ny Teknikk. In August Sweden's State Forensic Laboratory (SKL) asked for the film to be delivered there after beginning a comprehensive investigation of existing film and photographic evidence from the shipwreck. The Inspectorate has searched for the film for three months without success, and cannot explain how it has disappeared from its archives. The film was taken at the turn of 1995-96 and investigated the depth to which the Estonia had sunk and the conditions of the seabed around the wreck. The sinking of the Estonia on Sep. 28, 1994 cost 852 lives, 501 of them Swedish. The cause of the disaster, the worst in European post-war history, has been hotly discussed for over a decade. Of the 830 passengers and crew of 159 from a total of 17 nations, only 137 survived. The German built ship now lies off the southeast coast of Finland's Utö.
A multinational investigative committee with members from Sweden, Finland and Estonia was formed and a 1997 report concluded that no one could be held responsible for the disaster.
This conclusion did not satisfy many, and an organization for survivors and victim relatives continues to fight for a new investigation of the shipwreck.
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