50 tonnes of silver recovered from sea

London, July 20 (IANS)Around 50 tonnes of silver lost during World War II after a British merchant vessel was sunk in the Atlantic has been hauled up from the sea.

A US salvage company spent six weeks recovering the bullion from the cargo holds of the SS Gairsoppa, a 126 metre long cargo ship sunk by a German U-boat in February 1941 with the loss of more than 80 crew, most of them from the Indian sub continent, The Independent reported.

The silver, worth about 24 million pounds (about $ 37 million), represented only 20 percent of the bars that may remain on the British ship, according to Odyssey Marine which recently lost a legal dispute with the Spanish government over nearly 600,000 coins recovered from a colonial-era wreck.

The recovery operation is taking place some 300 miles off the Irish coast. It is the largest and deepest for precious metal lost in a shipwreck.