- Sunday, April 28, 2024
By: Chandrashekar Bhat
BRITISH Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood and his teenage son Suleman who both perished in the submersible Tatan in the Atlantic Ocean had long cherished a dream of viewing the wreck of the Titanic.
Christine – Dawood’s wife and Suleman’s mother – said she had previously planned to go with her husband on the voyage but “stepped back” for the sake of her son who “really wanted to go”.
The Titan, carrying five people, was found in pieces from a “catastrophic implosion” that killed everyone aboard, the US Coast Guard said on Thursday (23), ending a multinational five-day search for the vessel.
The submersible was owned by OceanGate whose CEO Stockton Rush, British businessman Hamish Harding and former French navy diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet also died during the failed expedition.
Christine told the BBC that Suleman, 19, who was studying at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow loved the Rubik’s Cube and carried it on his voyage in the hope of setting a world record of the deepest solving.
“I’m going to solve the Rubik’s Cube 3,700 metres below the sea at the Titanic,” she quoted her son as saying.
She recalled how she, her 17-year-old daughter Alina, Suleman and Dawood shared jokes and hugged each other before the deep sea voyage.
“I was really happy for them because both of them really wanted to do that for a very long time,” Christine said.
She and her daughter were on the Titan’s support ship Polar Prince when the search for the missing submersible was going on.
When the information came in that the communication with the Titan had been lost, she did not know what it meant.
“I didn’t comprehend at that moment what it meant – and then it just went downhill from there,” Christine said.
There was oxygen in the sub sufficient for four days and Christine said she lost hope “when we passed the 96 hours mark.”
The family who came back to St John’s on Saturday (24) held a funeral prayer for Shahzada and Suleman the next day.
Christine said, “I really, really miss them”.
The US Coast Guard said it is investigating the cause of the undersea implosion of the Titan.
Its announcement on Sunday (25) came a day after the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said it was conducting its own probe into the incident, which has raised questions about the unregulated nature of such expeditions.
