ordered to enter on 29 January. Later, Ra'anan requested to enter a day earlier, on 28 January. This request was denied, as the welcoming ceremony could not be rescheduled. Loss At 06:10 on 24 January 1968 Dakar transmitted her position, 34.16°N 26.26°E, just east of Crete. Over the next 18 hours she sent three control transmissions which did not include her position. Her final broadcast was at 00:02 25 January, after which no further transmissions were received. On 26 January the British Admiralty reported the submarine was missing and gave the last known position as west of Cyprus. An international search and rescue operation began, including units from Israel, the United States, Greece, Turkey, Britain and Lebanon. Although the Israeli Navy in Haifa began broadcasting calls to commercial vessels to be on the look out for Dakar, Israeli officials would not admit the submarine was missing. On 27 January, a radio station in Nicosia, Cyprus received a distress call on the frequency of Dakars emergency buoy, apparently from south-east of Cyprus, but no further traces of the submarine were found. On 31 January, all non-Israeli forces abandoned their search at sunset. Israeli forces continued the search for another four days, ceasing at sundown on 4 February 1968. Israel denied that Dakar sank as the result of hostile action. It stated that Dakar was involved in crash diving exercises on its return voyage and was probably lost as a result of a mechanical failure. On 25 April 1968, Vice Admiral Avraham Botzer, commander of the Israeli Navy, stated that Dakar sank on 24 January 1968, two days before being reported missing, due to "technical or human malfunctioning" and not "foul play". Searches and discovery On 9 February 1969, more than a year after Dakar went missing, a fisherman found her stern emergency buoy marker washed up on the coast of Khan Yunis, a town southwest of Gaza. British T-class submarines had two such buoy markers, bow and stern, secured behind wooden doors in cages under the deck and attached to the submarine with metal cables long. The experts who examined the of cable still attached to the buoy made several inaccurate determinations. These conclusions - that the buoy had remained attached to the submarine for most of the preceding year until the cable broke completely, that Dakar rested in depth between , and that it was off her planned route -