"It was more exciting to find than the Titanic because to me the Titanic is just a shipwreck," Thomas Dettweiler, who led the search teams for both vessels, told Agence France-Presse aboard his boat. "With the Titanic most people have died who had any connection with it, but with the Dakar it's still living."

On Sunday, 31 years after the ship was lost at sea, Israel officially went into mourning. Newspapers printed pictures of each downed naval crewman and officer, pictures frozen in time. Israel Radio played somber music, and, repeatedly, a recording of the final transmission from the ship -- a musical tribute to the ship sung by its new crew.

In a place where the ritual of burial is a national obsession, many urged the government to try to raise the submarine from the deep to retrieve whatever human remains might exist after all this time.

"I pray that they will pull the submarine from the sea and bring the boys to burial in Israel so we will have somewhere to go and cry," Shmuel Shenfer, whose son Reuven was aboard, told Itim, the Israeli news agency.

In a disturbing coda to the Dakar saga, a former navy commander, Adm. Michael Barkai, killed himself hours after hearing that the submarine had been located. His brother, Maj. Avraham Barkai, had been the ship's deputy commander.

The admiral, whose decorated navy career ended abruptly 20 years ago after he stood trial and was acquitted on sexual assault charges, had been sick with cancer.

In January 1968, an Israeli crew set out from Portsmouth, England, to introduce the new submarine into the Israeli naval fleet. Purchased from the British, the World War II-era vessel had been refurbished and proudly inaugurated before the journey.

Just off Crete, the ship sent what would be its final message to shore, including the group warbling of a giddy, prideful tribute to the new craft, written by Avraham Barkai: "The Dakar is in the depths in full strength," they sang.

Then the ship disappeared. For two weeks, the Israeli navy searched, with help from other navies. In mid-February, Moshe Dayan, then the defense minister, and senior military officials pronounced the hunt futile.

"The day the Dakar was declared sunk with all hands aboard has remained indelibly etched on my soul," Zeev Schiff, the military editor of Haaretz, wrote Sunday. Schiff described how a crowd of the crew's relatives, gathered at a naval base, was stunned into silence after officials proclaimed the search to be over.

Schiff continued: "Then, one voice started wailing, and the floodgate of tears was let loose as an untamed cry of bereavement arose from the hundreds of voices in unison. The mood swung from grief to pandemonium, as everyone stormed the podium."

Dayan, he said, sneaked out the back door.

About a year after the initial search was called off, the submarine's emergency buoy washed up on the coast off the Gaza Strip. The navy made the assumption that the boat had veered from its course to go down in relatively shallow waters off Egypt. That assumption governed a new round of searches for the Dakar, which were made easier after Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt.

Two years ago, under continuing pressure from the relatives of the crew, the navy asked for help from the United States, which assisted with further explorations. A few months ago, American Nauticus Corp., which discovered the remains of the Titanic, was hired by Israel to use its advanced technology to sweep the ocean floor. With sonar gear and robot-guided deep-sea cameras, the Dakar was found about 300 miles west of Israel -- precisely on its original course.

The submarine had vanished, though, during an era when delicately balanced superpower rivalries were being fought out beneath the seas, when Israel and Egypt were still enemies and when Soviet and Egyptian fleets dotted the Mediterranean.

Its mysterious disappearance inevitably spawned any number of theories, and the mystery will not be resolved for some time, if ever. An initial examination of the submarine suggested that it did not sink because of an enemy attack, but more likely because of a technical malfunction, human error or a collision.

Brig. Gen. Gideon Raz, a former deputy commander in the Israeli navy, visited the site of the wreck Sunday and observed the submarine through an underwater camera. He said that the front section was whole, the middle section damaged and the rear section separated from the main body. Parts were spread about the ocean floor.

"I think we can say that it was not caused by a large explosion, or explosives, or ammunition," he said. "One thing is clear, given that the pieces did not spread over a large radius: It fell almost whole until the end of its fall.'