A man has stabbed and injured a colleague at a research station in Antarctica after suffering an apparent emotional breakdown.

Russia's Interfax news agency said the incident at the Bellingshausen station on King George Island on 9 October had resulted from "tensions in a confined space".

The victim, a researcher, was flown to a hospital in Chile - the nearest country to the remote base.

Interfax said the assailant, also a researcher, voluntarily surrendered to the station chief and was placed under house arrest.

The Pravda news agency named the attacker as Sergei Savitsky and the victim as Oleg Beloguzov.


It reported that Savitsky stabbed his co-worker in the chest in the base's dining room.

Savitsky was later flown to St Petersburg, where he was arrested at the airport and charged with attempted murder.

No motive for the attack has been confirmed.

Alexander Klepikov, the chief of the Russian Antarctic expedition, told Pravda that 12 people remained at the station.

The Bellingshausen Station was founded by the Soviet Union in 1968 and is named after Fabian Gottlieb von Bellingshausen, a 19th-century Russian Antarctic explorer.

Transport to Bellingshausen runs all year round, unlike at other stations located closer to the South Pole.

Pravda said it is considered almost like a "resort" by polar explorers because temperatures rarely go below zero.