A 25-year-old Trident submariner who died in unexplained circumstances at the Faslane naval base on Thursday has been named as engineering technician Stephen Cashman by the Royal Navy.
Police Scotland is continuing to investigate the sudden death, first reported to officers at 12.30pm on Thursday, which is believed to have taken place in the barracks at the base for Britain’s nuclear deterrent.
A Royal Navy spokesperson said that Cashman’s relatives had now been informed. “Our thoughts and sympathies are with Stephen’s family and friends at this difficult time and we request their privacy is respected,” they said.
Earlier, defence sources had indicated the deceased was a junior crew member who worked on a Vanguard-class vessel that carries the UK’s Trident missiles.
A Police Scotland spokesperson said: “A postmortem examination will be carried out to establish the exact cause of death, which is currently being treated as unexplained. A report will be submitted to the procurator fiscal.”
Faslane is the home base to the UK’s nuclear-armed submarines, including the four Vanguard-class vessels, and was a setting in recent BBC drama Vigil. Also based there are the Astute-class fleet of hunter-killer submarines.
There are about 5,000 submariners who crew the vessels, and the deceased would have been well known around the small, relatively closed community at the lochside base, off the Clyde, 33 miles west of Glasgow.
Teams are deployed underwater for several months at a time before returning to base for a similar period for training and to help maintain the boats as necessary.
Faslane’s sister base at Coulport, which stores and services Trident missile warheads, faces a series of unrelated one-day strikes by 70 civilian workers with the Unite union.
