The British submarine Conqueror fired upon the Belgrano, hitting it with two torpedos (a third was fired but missed).
On April 12, the British Navy established an MEZ, or Maritime Exclusion Zone, around the Falkland Islands.
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This meant that any Argentinian ship entering that area would be fired upon.

On April 30, this was intensified to a Total Exclusion Zone – meaning Britain warned that any ship, from any nation, would be attacked.

Both of these actions were dubiously legal – the Law of the Sea Convention made no provisions for such zones – but were respected by the international community of neutral nations nonetheless.

In early May, British intelligence intercepted an internal Argentinian communication with plans to prepare for an attack.

In response, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher agreed to requests from her Chief of Defence Staff to approve an attack on a ship outside the Total Exclusion Zone.
There is some debate as to whether the sinking of the Belgrano constitutes a war crime.

Anti-imperialist Labour MP Tam Dalyell was a staunch critic of Britain’s actions in the Falklands.

In 1985, a senior civil servant leaked documents to Dalyell revealing that the Belgrano had not only been outside the already dubiously legal exclusion zone, but had also been sailing away from it when it was fired upon.

In 2012, then-President of Argentina Cristina Fernández de Kirchner referred to the sinking of the Belgrano as a “war crime”, though that’s not a view officially held by Argentina’s Navy.
At 14:57 on 2 May, Conqueror fired three 21-inch Mk 8 mod 4 torpedoes (conventional, non-guided, torpedoes), each with an 805-pound (363 kg) Torpex warhead. While Conqueror was also equipped with the newer Mark 24 Tigerfish homing torpedo, there were doubts about its reliability.Initial reports from Argentina claimed that Conqueror fired two Tigerfish torpedoes on General Belgrano. Two of the three torpedoes hit General Belgrano.

One of the torpedoes struck 10 to 15 metres (33 to 49 ft) aft of the bow, outside the area protected by either the ship's side armour or the internal anti-torpedo bulge. This blew off the ship's bow, but the internal torpedo bulkheads held and the forward powder magazine for the 40 mm gun did not detonate. It is believed that none of the ship's company were in that part of the ship at the time of the explosion.

The second torpedo struck about three-quarters of the way along the ship, just outside the rear limit of the side armour plating. The torpedo punched through the side of the ship before exploding in the aft machine room. The explosion tore upward through two messes and a relaxation area called "the Soda Fountain" before finally ripping a 20-metre-long (66 ft) hole in the main deck. Later reports put the number of deaths in the area around the explosion at 275 men. After the explosion, the ship rapidly filled with smoke. The explosion also damaged General Belgrano's electrical power system, preventing her from putting out a radio distress call. Though the forward bulkheads held, water was rushing in through the hole created by the second torpedo and could not be pumped out because of the electrical power failure. In addition, although the ship should have been "at action stations", she was sailing with the water-tight doors open.

The ship began to list to port and to sink towards the bow. Twenty minutes after the attack, at 16:24, Captain Bonzo ordered the crew to abandon ship. Inflatable life rafts were deployed, and the evacuation began without panic

Interestingly, the Captain of the Belgrano Hector Bonzo – who survived the attack, dying in 2009 of a heart attack at 76 – maintained that the attack was not a war crime.

He argued in 2007 that the Conqueror’s actions were “absolutely not a war crime. It was an act of war, lamentably legal.”

The families of the sailors killed attempted to sue the British Government in the European Court of Human Rights in 2000, though the suit was ruled inadmissible due to the length of time that had passed since the attack

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