TALLINN: Relatives of the victims of a 1994 Baltic Sea ferry sinking that claimed 852 lives are stepping up pressure for a new probe of enduring claims that the disaster was caused by an explosion.

“So much new evidence has emerged in recent years that we no longer have even the slightest doubt that the international report and its conclusions compiled and published in 1997 did not indicate the true reasons why the ship sank,” Helje Kaskel, head of the Estonia Litigation Association, said yesterday. The association of victims’ relatives will tomorrow launch a week-long publicity campaign to highlight why a new international investigation is needed, she said.

The ferry Estonia sank on the night of September 28, 1994, as it sailed from the Estonian capital Tallinn to Stockholm in Sweden. All but 137 of the 989 passengers and crew on board perished.

Most of the victims were Swedish. An international probe in 1997 ruled that faulty bow doors which gave way in a storm had caused the accident, the worst in the Baltic in peace time. But both Estonia and Sweden opened new investigations in 2005 after many relatives of the dead, shipping experts and politicians claimed the ferry went down following an explosion. An acknowledgment by Sweden that Soviet military equipment had been transported on the ferry on several occasions in 1994 gave credence to the theory. Estonia had broken free from the crumbling Soviet Union in 1991, but the Red Army only left the country on August 31, 1994.

The Estonian report, issued in 2007, said that chemical analyses had ruled out an explosion, at least near the bow doors. But Kaskel, whose organisation groups victims’ relatives, said the use of the ferry to transport Soviet equipment to unknown recipients remained “among the most disturbing information” to have emerged.

The Estonian probe, led by state prosecutor Margus Kurm, had taken issue with several areas of the 1997 report. Kurm’s report included testimony from two crew members who said that the car-deck ramp remained closed, raising the question of why divers found water on the deck below.