VLADIVOSTOK, April 23 (RAPSI) - Acting Pacific Fleet Chief of Staff Rear Admiral Andrei Voitovich says that a video of the Nerpa submarine accident exists although it was not included by prosecutors into the criminal case records, RIA Novosti reports on Tuesday.

On Nov. 8, 2008, the Akula-II class nuclear attack submarine was running sea trials in the Sea of Japan in the western Pacific when its freon-based fire extinguishing system malfunctioned, killing 20 of the 208 people on board and injuring 21.

Captain Dmitry Lavrentyev was charged with abuse of power and engineer Dmitry Grobov was accused of negligently causing death. The jury acquitted both men on Sep. 14, 2011. The Supreme Court's military board overturned the verdict in May 2012 and ordered a retrial.

Voitovich says the video exists which confirms that the captain of the submarine and its crew did their best to overcome the accident. "How could they ignore it when the video - not the disk that the Prosecutor's Office seized during the General Staff Commission's work - made it impossible to attribute the accident to the poor training of the crew," Voitovich was quoted as saying.

According to him, the video's whereabouts are unknown, as it was seized by prosecutors in the aftermath of the disaster. Furthermore, it would be impossible to play it outside of the submarine except for at the Avrora company located in Primorsky region. 

An attempt to avoid public criticism sparked by retrial in the Nerpa accident case is one of the reasons for the prosecutors to conceal the information, Voitovich says.

The investigative authorities claim that there is no any classified footage except the video shot after the accident which shows how the audio record of the control systems work at the submarine is decoded.