Their open coffins were laid out in accordance with Orthodox religious tradition in the shipyards at Komsomolsk-on-Amur in the Russian Far East, seven time zones east of Moscow, before being buried together at the local cemetery.

Thousands of people attended the funeral in this close-knit community.

Twenty people were killed on Saturday when a fire extinguishing system was triggered apparently by accident as the new submarine was being tested in the Sea of Japan, pumping gas into the vessel and depriving them of oxygen.

"There were many friends of my son's on board the submarine. They were lucky. They survived," said Olga Krasikova, as she cried over her son Yevgeny, a 27-year-old shipbuilding engineer who was on board for the trial.

"He was in the gym and didn't have time to put on a gas mask," she said.

Some 3,000 people including military personnel and employees from the Amur shipyard attended the funeral ceremony in this city of 200,000. A guard of honour fired into the air after two Orthodox priests read out prayers.

Vladimir Starodubov, a workshop manager, said he was mourning the death of five of his employees including Alexander Nezhura, a 25-year-old worker who was on the submarine Nerpa with his father.

"He did a heroic thing. Alexander pulled his father out of the affected section, then came back to help the others. He suffocated to death," Starodubov said at the ceremony in the shipyard where the Nezhuras worked.

"This is the saddest day in the history of our city," local mayor Vladimir Mikhalyov told the assembled mourners, as city authorities announced they would build a monument to the victims in the city's cemetery.

Russian investigators have said all the victims of the accident on the Nerpa, a new Akula-class nuclear-powered attack submarine, were suffocated by Freon gas that was accidentally pumped into part of the vessel.

There were also set to be three more funerals in Komsomolsk-on-Amur, two in Moscow and three in Bolshoi Kamen, the shipyard in eastern Russia from which the submarine set sail and where the vessel returned to after the accident.

An official enquiry is due to present its conclusions later this week.

The submarine's captain, Dmitry Lavrentyev, sounded a defiant note in an interview with the tabloid newspaper Tvoi Den, saying trials of the submarine would resume as soon as the enquiry was over.

"As soon as the investigation is finished, tests of the submarine will be continued," he said. "I'm the vessel's commander and as long as she's here I'll stay with her."

The head of the military's general staff, Nikolai Makarov, echoed that view, saying that despite the problems the submarine had actually passed its trial and would be authorised for use by the Russian Navy.

"Despite the sad accident that led to people's deaths, the tests of the nuclear-powered submarine showed all its components, units and steering systems were working efficiently," Makarov said, quoted by Russian news agencies.

The accident was the worst naval disaster in Russia since the sinking of the Kursk submarine in the Barents Sea in 2000 in which all 118 sailors on board died, casting a long shadow on then president Vladimir Putin's rule.

There has been only very limited access for journalists to the survivors of the accident, who have been kept in a closed military hospital, and Russian Navy officials at first did not name the submarine.

The Kommersant newspaper and other Russian media have reported the vessel was to be leased to India on a contract worth 650 million dollars but Russian news agencies quoted an arms industry official saying this was not the case.

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