Original subtitles

We were anxious to get out there and

we wanted to find the ship, to prove that this did occur.

We'd spent six months to get to this point and

we were running out of time.

The judge needed this evidence

and the stakes were high.

Somebody's life is in the balance in terms

of whether they're found innocent or guilty.

This is a murder trial.

It's one of the biggest criminal cases

in maritime history.

All of these things were preying on my mind.

The story of the missing cargo of

Uranium processing equipment and six dead sailors.

REPORTER 2 Standing trial is businessman,

Udo Proksch, accused of blowing up the ship.

Udo Proksch said the pirates took it.

He had several stories, but without evidence, we,

he couldn't be prosecuted.

Is Proksch innocent or guilty?

The truth lies far beneath the waves.

We were searching in water deeper than the Titanic.

What we doing in that kind of environment and that

kind of ship with a sitting judge in a murder trial.

There's never been anything like it.

.

1985, Ronald Reagan was in power.

REAGAN The force is with us.

Microsoft Windows was about to come out and

Live Aid was born.

And it was an important time for me as well.

I was about nine months away from graduating with

my degree as a marine geologist.

I was running out of money.

I didn't have a place to live, and I wasn't really sure which

direction my life was going.

And then, I remember I have a very good memory of it.

I was watching TV one day, and like people all over the world,

I was amazed.

There on the screen, perhaps the most iconic discovery in

the history of underwater exploration;

the Titanic.

REPORTER For weeks now, the world has

marveled at the submarine pictures of the wreck.

And I thought, cool!

What if I could do that job?

I loved the idea of operating this equipment,

of being challenged with a job like that.

I remember sending out 70, 80 CV's,

and I only got one real hit,

and that was from Eastport International,

a very small company.

These guys were doing amazing work.

They were operating deeper than the Titanic to find

lost objects on the seabed.

And soon after I joined them, they got one of

the most incredible missions you could imagine.

To go and find a ship called the Lucona.

The mystery surrounding it was extraordinary.

What we knew about Lucona, was that it was loaded in Italy

in Chioggia, during the first part of January, 1977.

And then it was gonna be sailing to the Far East.

The ship was underway in the Indian Ocean,

about 17 days into the journey,

when something unimaginable happened.

I saw a yellow-red fireball about

15 meters high over the deck.

I felt the shock and looked up.

All I could see was smoke.

The windows had been blown in by the air pressure.

The ship started to rapidly lurch to starboard.

I jumped overboard.

The only thing I could see, was the wheelhouse and the stern.

The ship went down vertically while the propeller was still rotating.

The first thing was, what just happened?

That can't be, that's impossible!

One minute we're on the ship,

and two minutes later it's completely gone!

I heard the screams of the first engineer

who went down with it.

I can still hear his scream.

And the others who were lost,

I can still see them in front of me.

That doesn't go away.

The ship sank and six people were killed.

The six that did survive were able to get into a life raft and

were picked up the following day.

If it wasn't for the survivors' remarkable story,

this would never have come to court.

An Austrian man called Udo Proksch,

was suspected of blowing up the Lucona,

to defraud an insurance company

out of the insurance for a cargo.

Proksch had a series of defenses.

One, remarkably, that the ship never sank,

that it was actually captured by pirates and

it was still sailing the seas.

But he had no part of it.

That was his main defense.

My name is Hans Leiningen,

I happened to be the judge in the Lucona case,

and I thought, well, nobody blows up ships.

It's idiotic, that's stupid.

Which made me suspicious, therefore I thought we should

find the wreckage because if we don't,

there's no proof at all.

So, Lucona had to be found.

It was up to us.

And if we didn't do that, there'd be no justice.

This was the first big deep-water project that

I was gonna be the project manager.

And so for me personally, the stakes were high.

And with the trial underway,

it could only be paused for a short time.

We had just four weeks.

So the real question was, could we find it?

And if we did find it, could we bring back this evidence

that it was blown up by a bomb?

We had a team of ten people.

Eight were basically running the search,

and two were just working on the ROV and

that was Bill Lawson and Greg Gibson.

We are basically the eyes and hands of the investigators,

when it comes down to deep water investigation.

So we allow them to get into the deep ocean to get their evidence.

The Lucona job was different.

Everything was spec'd out from 7,000 meters.

And, you know, working at that depth is

a very challenging task.

Don was my direct boss.

If he said blast through that wall,

you would do it for Don 'cause

he was a very charismatic leader.

A straight line...

This was the first we ever had a judge on board.

It was a little different.

And we told the judge, "We can do this."

We weren't sure how we were gonna do it,

but we said we could do it.

.

We also had Gerhard Strasser,

the naval architect on the ship.

David Mearns said, "If it's there we'll find it."

And I couldn't believe it because for a search,

I think it was the deepest at that time.

So the first question we all faced was where to look.

Because the Indian Ocean is very large.

Obviously, you go for the most probable sinking location,

or the last known position.

And to find that, the survivors' evidence was really,

really important.

From the people being picked up in the water,

they could back out currents and wind strengths

and their lifeboat drift.

And then, do a probability analysis.

Their drift pattern told them

where the wreckage probably was.

But even still, that area was huge.

It was an area that was about 400 square nautical miles.

It's at least the size of London.

And you're looking for something that's 75 meters for

a ship of that size.

And it's not intact, it's blown apart.

So you're looking for something that's even smaller.

And that made finding it much, much harder.

He was a man, Udo Proksch, who'd been accused of blowing up

a ship and killing the crew.

We were all wondering, who was this guy in the dock?

Was he innocent, or guilty?

My name is Bernd Stracke,

I was an investigative journalist and court reporter,

covering crime and disasters.

Udo Proksch was originally from Germany,

a showman, a genius, a whizz kid,

who could pull off anything.

With incredible networks.

He had friends everywhere, in every field.

He was smart.

Udo was making a club to entertain other people,

that was Club 45.

He had many friends in the higher ranks of justice,

and higher ranks of political people.

And, uh, that's how he worked.

There were not only waitresses

running round in cute white outfits,

but I was also told that well-known ladies stripped off,

and that was a 'jolly' for major politicians and business people.

But the main interest from Proksch was to corrupt people

politicians who he needed for doing him some favor.

Udo was a fan of camouflage gear, a fan of firearms.

He was a fan of explosives and of the military in general.

And for many years he was a good friend of

Defense Minister Karl Lütgendorf.

Udo played around with explosives.

The fact that this was not prevented

is the fault of Karl Lütgendorf.

Once the search box was determined from

the last known position, then you search in a series of lines,

a grid of lines.

But that's not easy.

The sonar is on an 8,000, 9,000 meters of cable,

several miles behind the ship.

And at the end of these lines,

you have to make a great big turn.

You've gotta come around to the next line over.

So it's line, turn,

line, turn, line, turn.

You don't wanna leave any gaps, no holidays.

It's just like mowing a lawn.

Back and forth, back and forth and just looking for

anything that's on the seafloor.

What was the depth?

Echo sounders reading about 4150 meters or so.

There's the bottom.

You can see it is flat.

We were breaking a record.

The Titanic was 3,800 meters, we were searching for Lucona

in depths beyond 4,000 meters.

And less than a handful of ships had been found in deeper water,

4,000 meters or greater.

And the forces are enormous.

It's deadly in terms of destroying your equipment

as quick as that.

Days went by, days went by,

days went by and we hadn't found the wreck.

So after countless hours of searching, the Lucona team

are still searching.

Did you think you could find the Lucona at this point?

No.

It was extremely unlikely that we find it.

It was 4,000 meters deep.

And, you know, that the Titanic, less deep,

took a long time to find it and its position was known.

So I thought it was impossible to find the ship.

So day after day goes by, and we're now getting

to the point where the search box is nearly covered.

And I'm thinking, wow, you know,

something's wrong here.

We haven't found it.

So if it's not in my box, where is it?

This was the busiest shipping lane between

Asia and Europe in existence.

And there was nothing. No debris. No wreck.

This is line number two.

No targets yet.

We were trying to figure out, well,

did we miss it?

We couldn't see anything.

I thought that's strange, huh?

Maybe the search box was wrong.

The experts took account of current and wind and so on.

But I could see that the current was from a different direction.

And then, I realized that it was a failure of the experts.

And so that makes it even more unlikely you'll find it.

But, I decided we had to keep going.

We couldn't stop.

What are we seeing on QTIPS?

Not much.

And I did this last line, which was line number five.

It was about 7:00 in the morning.

And we start seeing small bits of targets,

we call objects targets.

About, uh, 200 meters.

And they're small.

And then we start seeing more.

And then we start seeing a cluster of them.

Boy, that looks good!

I could see a shadow behind it.

That tells me something is sitting off the seabed.

In flat mud, that's unusual.

That's a red flag.

You could tell that this was of manmade origin.

And we knew that we had something.

And that was a great big object, many,

many times bigger than anything else.

Oh, here's our first good-looking target.

One large piece, about 26 meters by about 23 meters.

This could be it.

That's it.

But, as good as a sonar image is to me,

it means very little in a court of law.

I had to convince the jury that we have found

the wreckage, the Lucona.

But we only had pixels.

This was really not enough to tell them that

these pixels must be the Lucona.

The big question was, is it a ship?

And if it is a ship, is it Lucona?

It's strange that Karl Lütgendorf,

the Defense Minister,

responsible for the Austrian army

and the explosives that Udo Proksch wanted,

was found shot dead in his hunting vehicle.

Lütgendorf was known to be right-handed,

but the gun was in his left hand

and he shot himself through clenched teeth.

Shooting right through the teeth like that made no sense to the forensic experts.

There are still doubts over the case.

Lütgendorf's son is convinced that his father was murdered.

Journalists investigating Karl Lütgendorf's

mysterious death, have uncovered a web of corruption.

And a new book just published on the Lucona affair,

implicates Udo Proksch, who now appears to be on the run.

When I went to the Lucona case,

I thought, well, at that time Udo Proksch would never

be caught, and he would never come back.

So I said, well, no problem.

I'll take it.

And this was a big mistake.

Because he did come back.

Udo Proksch's people thought we would never find the Lucona.

They said just go on and this will prove that we are innocent.

We had the sonar results and it looked like a ship.

But it wasn't enough detail to pick anything out.

The only way you can get that was photographic or

video evidence of the wreckage.

That was the hard evidence we had to provide next.

Filming it with the ROV, a remotely operated vehicle.

We switched over to the ROV and found out that

the sonar had a problem.

Without the sonar, we were gonna be almost blind.

A sonar, uh, will allow you to see objects out at least

100 meters at a, at a good resolution.

With that inoperative,

you cannot see the environment you're in.

And one of the worst things that can happen to you,

is getting the umbilical tied into the wreckage at depth.

So, it was suicidal,

diving that ROV in that sort of condition.

But I don't think we had a choice.

We had to dive.

But we had no idea whether it would work.

The deep ocean, 4,000 meters,

absolutely pitch black.

Black, black, black.

It is like driving down a motorway with your eyes closed,

not knowing what you're gonna hit next.

While you're trying to collect evidence.

It's mad. Mad.

We didn't see anything for a long time.

Sometimes there came a, a small fish, but nothing more.

The seabed had been absolutely flat,

like a billiard table.

And then the first thing that you see,

are these great big mounds of sediments,

like a bomb-crater.

Mounds of seabed that have been thrown up.

And you see them first and you say, "Whoa!

Where did that come from?"

And then, all of a sudden it's there.

The hull of the ship.

And the wreckage appeared.

I really heard the music of Strauss.

Also Sprach Zarathustra, bom, bom, bom, bom,

playing in my head.

The wheelhouse looks perfect,

the ladders look right.

The hatches look right.

But is there anything out there that just tells us

that this is Lucona?

What's the easiest way to identify the Lucona?

To see the name L-U-C-O-N-A.

The name on the stern of the ship.

We are looking to where the rudder would be and

where the name would be above it.

And they're all buried.

The ship had impacted so great, we couldn't see the propeller,

we couldn't see the rudder.

The stern of the ship was so deeply buried,

the name was just not visible.

It just wasn't there.

So we knew we had to go look for something else.

Okay, the next obvious point is the bow.

The name, "Lucona," was also on the bow of the ship,

but way up at the front.

So we started maneuvering forward.

Cargo hold number two, the aft cargo hold, was there.

But then we got up to the middle part of the ship

where the main mast and the booms were.

And then there was nothing.

There was no bow.

There was no cargo hold number one.

There was no anchors, there was nothing.

It was gone.

We could come up off the bottom and kind of have

a God's eye view looking down.

And the whole forward of the bridge superstructure was

pretty much blown to pieces.

That looks like a blown up ship to me.

It was a big shock.

For me it was.

The front was gone, you couldn't see the name and

that made it much more complicated.

It looks like the Lucona, it's where the Lucona should be.

And so, I was convinced that we have found it,

but that's not enough if I am convinced,

as I have to convince the jury.

So, the question was, could we find something better,

better evidence to identify the ship by different means?

So we looked around to find some debris which would

inform us what the ship was.

The debris field was huge.

It was about a kilometer square,

which equates to about 100 football fields.

It was enormous!

It was such a huge area to search and

we had so little time.

We got out in the debris field,

and we started mapping out the largest objects.

Flying the debris field wreckage,

it just kinda rained down on the seafloor.

And it was some big chunks of steel.

Lots of sharp edges that can cut your umbilical.

You could tell the stress levels were high.

Proksch claimed his cargo was Uranium processing equipment,

that was insured for about $20 million US.

And we're going around the debris field saying,

"Well, does that look like Uranium processing equipment to you?"

Some of the biggest items we found on the debris field,

were 20 foot shipping containers.

They were on their side.

One had its to ripped open.

And when we looked inside, it was totally different to

what Udo had claimed.

It was all scrap metal, rusted steel.

This was like rubbish.

The cargo was not what it was expected to be.

This looked like equipment that was really kind

of agricultural, not Uranium processing equipment.

It just didn't make any sense.

We're still not seeing anything that identifies it.

And we're still searching blind, and that was the real problem.

Without a working sonar, we had no chance to really prove

that this was Lucona.

We decided to go to Sri Lanka.

We would bring the ROV and repair it.

And then finally, we were able to get the parts that

we needed and get the sonar fixed and get it back in the water.

This was our last chance to find out

whether it's Lucona or not.

Up until this point, we'd been flying, like,

almost blind.

But now, back at the wreck, we had a working sonar,

it was a dream.

Because now you could navigate with safety

around the debris field.

Cable out at 6-5-88.

But could we identify the ship as Lucona?

We're now entering the debris field.

Once you settle out on the bottom,

you do a sonar scan.

And we knew where the targets were around us with the sonar.

It was night and day difference.

Udo Proksch had a manifest of the cargo with specific numbers.

We were hoping to find the same numbers we had on the list.

This will prove that we have found the Lucona.

I was in the control room with David.

I asked him, take a photo of this,

take a photo of this.

And then I realized it is going to be a problem.

Because we needed to get very close to see if anything

was written on the cargo.

The type of ships that we use today,

can stay on station like a rock.

Even with winds and currents and waves.

And this what you need, because we're dangling

an ROV 4,000 meters below it.

But we're on a ship that was different.

It would lose position and it would drag the ROV off the bottom.

So, we would something,

a fleeting image and we'd be pulled away.

Oh, look out.

Whoa, that's what you call ship roll.

So, this was absolute seat of the pants

cowboy kind of stuff.

We finally control the accuracy of it.

And, and then we started seeing something extraordinary.

Identifiable letters and numbers, stenciled

on the cargo.

B-10.

B-10.

B-10.

XP-13.

XP-13.

XP-13.

XB-19 was in red.

And you could see they were stenciled.

They were the exact same numbers as listed on the manifest.

From the numbers that were on the equipment,

they were able to trace it back to, uh, Udo Proksch.

Zapata, that's his company name.

So that's unmistakable.

It was finally proof of this is the ship, you know,

the Lucona, that we've been searching for.

It proved for sure what Udo's real intentions were.

We could see the steel imprints on it that said

it was mining equipment.

It was just scrap painted and numbered.

And so he wanted to cheat the,

the insurance company.

That was clear, for sure.

One simple box had everything on it.

With that alone, you could basically convict him.

I think we got it.

It's a special moment when you find a shipwreck.

Even one where there's loss of life involved.

You've spent six months for this thing to work.

You've been through the wringer already.

There was that realization,

and I was able to have a private moment myself.

There's the team that found Lucona.

Number one team.

Come on, give us a smile Gibson.

We'd linked the ship to Udo Proksch,

but that didn't prove he had sunk it deliberately.

In fact, it didn't even prove that he had sunk it at all.

He basically said,

the Russians blew it up with torpedoes.

That was his story.

And he was trying to stick to it.

So could, what we were looking at,

been caused by a torpedo?

Now the question was, how did the ship blow up?

How did it explode?

One of the defense arguments, on behalf of Proksch,

was that this was an arms deal gone wrong.

He claimed, unbeknownst to him somehow,

there were armaments on the ship and the Russians were trying to

prevent that ship from getting to Hong Kong.

So they torpedoed the Lucona.

And then he said, if it did blow up,

it was because the Russians had attacked it with a submarine.

But he had no part of it.

For me, it was clear, we have to find out whether it

was an explosion from inside or outside.

If it had been the Russians, it would have been outside.

The thinking was that a torpedo with a warhead

that explodes on contact,

that would look totally different than a bomb of TNT,

sitting in the cargo hold and just exploding.

We had to go find out the ways that metal was bent,

which was critical in proving whether the explosion

was internal to the ship, or external to the ship.

And so we wanted to get to both sides of the hull on

the middle part of the ship,

and see what the side plates looked like.

Really forensically examine it to come up with answers to

the final questions about what happened to Lucona.

So we started maneuvering along the side

and going up to the upper deck.

Strasser and the judge, they're watching over our shoulders.

One of the first things that you could see,

was paint ripped back.

It's discolored, and you could see rust is settling in.

The side plates, they were splayed outward,

almost perfectly on the starboard side.

You could see that there was a force from the inside that

pushed that piece of metal to the outside.

There was no signs of any torpedoes or

anything else affecting the explosion.

Something had to be placed in the middle of the ship,

blew up and blew the sides out.

It was crystal clear.

It blew up from the inside.

The crew would have had almost no idea what was going on.

They had no chance.

Proksch's lawyers claimed that the sailors that were

on the Lucona weren't dead.

They'd gotten new identities and were living out their lives in Barbados.

I went to two of the victims' families, Roberts and Davis,

and introduced myself.

And they said someone already visited and promised to make sure that

we surviving relatives, widows and orphans, get compensation and a pension.

They took every document, photo, and the identity papers of our father, husband

and said they needed these for the pension paperwork.

And we were looking forward to receiving a pension someday.

I'm 100% sure that these people who came there

to get these documents, they came from Udo Proksch.

I think they took the documents and the photographs and the letters

to destroy them and to let them disappear from the world.

I felt very bad. And I felt very angry.

I thought that for justice to be done,

this evidence was critical

for the Lucona case to be settled.

Now the big question for the judge,

going back to Vienna to court,

was did he have enough evidence to convict Udo?

It was a big event.

Many people there.

And then I was asked as an expert witness,

to show the evidence in court.

This was finally the moment of truth for the jury to

decide whether Udo was innocent or guilty.

.

All the evidence was indicative of the explosion

coming from the inside out.

There was a huge bomb, placed in cargo hold number one

that blew it up.

The explosion went off inside the forward cargo hold,

completely destroying the front of the ship.

But the Lucona sank even faster, because the bomb

blew a massive hole into the rear cargo hold as well.

That's why it got flooded.

It was only the bottom of the ship was still there.

It was like a rudder pulling the ship down.

And in one minute, ship was gone.

When you see things like that on the seabed,

the hard hat, that's signs of humanity.

Even though we don't find human remains,

we knew this was basically the grave site of six individuals.

There was loss of life and that just reminded everybody,

you know, really struck home.

Well, the procedure is that after the trial,

everybody made his final statements.

We'd go back to a room.

The jurors then vote

and need to reach a verdict on Udo Proksch.

It took them a long time to come to a result.

They then go to the judge and say we're ready.

Yeah, they have said he's guilty.

Proksch was sitting in front of me.

He turned around and said,

"You know, well done.

I hadn't expected that.

That you would really find it."

The only time I spoke to Udo Proksch directly,

he told me, I will getkilled by somebody, and I don't know exactly the date.

I don't know exactly the way, how they will do it.

But my life will not continue very long.

Udo Proksch fell ill with heart disease.

And he was told he needed a heart operation,

even though the chance of survival was only fifty percent.

He was 14 years on the run,

but the evidence that we provided,

as difficult it was to get, was convincing and conclusive.

But I also knew what you're trying to achieve,

is justice for these people who were killed.

They lost their lives because of the callous and

cruel and absolutely brutal objectives of some crazy people.

And it's no recompense for the six lives that were lost,

and the ones who survived, they are victims as well.