The submarine was overcrowded, locked cabin doors had to be smashed down and some of the sleeping crew were too dazed to put on gas masks, they said, after the biggest Russian naval disaster since the sinking of the Kursk in 2000.

"I was lying down resting after being on watch. Suddenly the freon gas started coming down right above me. It was like a drug. I lost consciousness," said Viktor Rifk, an engineer, the Komsomolskaya Pravda daily reported Tuesday.

Rifk and other survivors are at a military hospital near Vladivostok, Russia's main Pacific naval base. The area is off-limits to the media and the Komsomolskaya Pravda journalist was forced to sneak in through a fence.

Two of the men including Rifk were later shown on NTV television being visited by Sergei Darkin, governor of the Primorsky region in the Russian Far East which held a day of mourning on Tuesday for the victims.

"We all had gas masks but maybe some people didn't manage to put them on in time," Rifk said, lying in a hospital bed. In a nearby bed, Denis Koshevarov, a warrant officer, said: "There was an alarm... I was immediately knocked out."

Twenty-one people were injured by the poisoning, which happened while the new submarine was being tested out in the Sea of Japan and which was apparently caused by an accidental functioning of the fire extinguishing system.

The Kommersant daily said earlier the sub was due to be leased to India.

"After the liquefied gas literally fell down on us, I heard an alarm and then a cry from the executive officer: 'Switch on your breathing apparatus!'" said Sergei Anshakov, another engineer on the submarine.

The reasons why the system failed remain unknown, as no evidence of a fire was found on board, the ship's captain Igor Dygalo told the Interfax news agency.

Speaking to the Izvestia daily, Koshevarov said the toll could have been much higher.

"We were lucky. We were very lucky. First of all, it happened in the evening and not at night. There would have been more dead at night," Koshevarov said.

"The other thing is that the freon came down only in two sections, not in all six. It's frightening to think what might have happened," he added.

Alexei Shanin, another officer on board the submarine, recalled the frantic collective effort by the crew to rescue sleeping men poisoned by the freon gas spraying out of the fire extinguishing system and stuck in locked cabins.

"Everything happened at 18.05. The fire extinguishing system suddenly came on. It was like a tap on a water pipe: one moment it's shut and the next it's bursting out with water," Shanin told the Tvoi Den newspaper.

"We had to smash down the doors of the cabins that had been locked. We took the lads out. Two breaths of freon and that's it. Some of them died on our way into the port. Everyone who felt okay helped out," he added.

Shanin said there had already been problems with the K-152 Nerpa, an Akula-class attack nuclear-powered submarine, and that the number of people on board was far greater than allowed.

"There were 224 people on board. And the usual size of the crew is 80, 90 people. We even had to take turns sleeping," he said.

"We went out three times on that submarine. There were some problems before but we found them, then returned to the port and sorted them out. The accident happened on our third trip."

Observers said Russian officials' handling of the accident shows marked changes since the hushed-up Kursk disaster in 2000.

The sinking of the Kursk submarine was not announced until August 14, two days after the accident. Then President Vladimir Putin was apparently not told for several hours and did not visit victims' families until 11 days later.

Russian authorities maintained for a long time that the Kursk sank after "a collision with a foreign submarine belonging to a NATO country".

They admitted only months later the main cause had been the explosion of torpedoes on board, where as on Saturday, officials quickly pointed out the main cause of the accident.

"There is a huge difference between the official silence over the Kursk accident and what they are saying about the Nerpa," said Alexander Golts, an independent analyst in Moscow who runs a website about military affairs.

But many questions remain unanswered.

Images of two of the survivors were only shown on Russian television on Tuesday, a full three days after the accident, as they met with local governor Darkin.

Russian newspapers have also asked why the vessel was overcrowded and why crew members did not use their gas masks to protect themselves from the toxic gas.

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