The wreck of Italian battle cruiser "Giuseppe Garibaldi," which was sunk in 1915, was found yesterday in Croatian waters by a group of divers and Croatian archeologists who were searching for the ship.

The team had pinpointed the exact location of the ship through historic research. Diver's club "Dragor Lux" from Zagreb has discovered the wreck several miles from the coast of Dubrovnik, at a depth of 122 metres.

"We have filmed the ship and the footage leaves no room for doubt" explained mission leader Drazen Goricki. The "Garibaldi" was built in 1901 at the Ansaldo shipyards in Genoa. The ship was 112 metres long and 18 metres wide. It was used during the war against Turkey in Libyan waters and the Aegean Sea. On February 24 1912, together with the "Francesco Ferruccio", it sank the Turkish gunboat Avnillah off Beirut.

On July 17 1915, two months after the start of the war for Italy, a group of battleships commanded by admiral Tifari, who sailed on the "Garibaldi", weighed anchor in Brindisi and went on its way to destroy part of the railway connection between Sarajevo and Bay of Kotor, an important base of the Austrian Hungarian Empire at the time. In the night of July 18 the "Garibaldi" was hit by a torpedo launched from an Austrian U4 submarine near Dubrovnik. Some reports say that the cruiser went down in only three minutes. At the moment it was hit there were more than 550 crew members on board, 53 of them died in the attack. The rest of the fleet returned to Italy.

According to some estimates there are around 2,000 wrecks still resting on the bottom of the Adriatic Sea. So far only a few hundred of them have been found.