The photo, taken in 2004, shows the coat and boots lying on the seabed near the wreck of the Titanic.

A photo taken in 2004, made public for the first time this week in an uncut version marking the 100th anniversary of the Titanic disaster, shows a coat and boots lying in the mud at the site. The sinking site of the legendary ship.

US government officials, who have long fought to assert protection for the Titanic, say the sinking site may contain undiscovered bodies and should be revered as a cemetery. and need protection from looters.

“These are not boots that happened to fall out of someone’s bag and then lay neatly together like that. The way they lie shows that this is where they rest,” said James Delgado, director of maritime heritage at the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

“There are still victims’ remains inside,” Mr. Delgado asserted.

The photo above, along with two others showing the shoes next to each other, were taken during an expedition led by NOAA and Titanic finder Robert Ballard in 2004. The photos were published in a Ballard’s book about the expedition. However, Mr. Delgado said the photo of the coat and boots had been cropped, leaving only one boot in Ballard’s book.

Two shoes lying next to each other may be evidence that this is the resting place of a victim.

Mr. Delgado’s above strong assertions have caused conflicting views among Titanic experts. The most experienced divers expressed doubt that the bodies were still lying intact in unexplored ship compartments.

James Cameron, director of the famous movie Titanic, which won many Oscars and visited the shipwreck site 33 times, said he had never seen the remains of victims during his expeditions.

“We saw the shoes. We also saw shoes, indicating that there had been a body here at some point. But we have never seen any victims’ remains,” Mr. Cameron said.

For Mr. Delgado, who was the scientist who led a 2010 expedition to map the entire shipwreck site, the difference in opinion among experts is just a matter of semantics.

“As an archaeologist, I can say that those are the remains of victims,” he said, referring to the photo of the coat and boots. “Buried in the mud are most likely the remains of a victim’s body.”

Mr. Delgado added that the photos are also evidence that the world needs to make more efforts to protect the Titanic’s wreck.

There has been a long battle to save the Titanic since the wreck was discovered in 1985, starting with a federal law passed by the US Congress in 1986 to create an international agreement to remove the remains. ship into an international maritime memorial site.

Earlier this month, U.S. Senator John Kerry proposed a bill that some observers see as stronger than a 1986 law that would protect shipwreck sites from looting and haphazard research. beach.

But the Titanic was located in international waters, so the US government could not act arbitrarily on the wreck.

The wreck of the Titanic currently lies at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean.

Mr. Delgado said that there needs to be an international agreement between the US, France, Canada and the UK to better protect the Titanic wreck.

Titanic, the largest and most modern passenger ship at the time 100 years ago, sank at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean after colliding with an iceberg on April 15, 1912, killing more than 1,500 people on board. die.

After the Titanic sank, 340 bodies were recovered. Of the more than 1,500 people killed in the disaster, about 1,160 bodies have never been found.