A London woman whose 19-year-old son and husband were among five killed in the Titan submarine disaster has told of the moment she lost hope they would be found alive.
In her first interview since the catastrophe, Christine Dawood said she spent days hoping her son Suleman and husband Shahzada were “just going to come up”, but began “preparing for the worst” when the 96-hour mark passed.
Suleman Dawood, a 19-year-old business student at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, was killed along with his father, London businessman Shahzada Dawood, when the Titan submarine went missing last week on a voyage to view the wreck of the Titanic.
The submersible’s other three occupants – British billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, and OceanGate chief executive and Titan pilot Stockton Rush – were also killed in what is thought to have been a “catastrophic implosion”.
The Dawoods boarded the Polar Prince – the ship from which Titan was launched – on Father’s Day, hoping for the trip of a lifetime.
Mrs Dawood and her 17-year-old daughter, Alina, were still on board the support vessel when word came through that communications with Titan had been lost, and a mammoth search operation was launched.
For hours the mother and daughter, who are understood to live in Surbiton, south-west London, held out hope the crew would return safely.
“We all thought ‘they are just going to come up’ so that shock was delayed by about 10 hours or so,” Mrs Dawood told the BBC.
“There was a time… when they were supposed to be up on the surface again and when that time passed the real shock – not shock, but the worry and the not so good feelings – started.
“We had loads of hope. I think that was the only thing that got us through it because we were hoping… we talked about things that pilots can do like dropping weights, there were so many actions people on the sub can do in order to surface.
“We were constantly looking at the surface. There was so many things we would go through where we would think ‘it’s just slow right now, it’s slow right now’. But there was a lot of hope.”
She said she “lost hope” when 96 hours had passed since her husband and son boarded the submersible, which indicated they had run out of oxygen.
She revealed that’s when she sent a message to her family saying she was “preparing for the worst”.
Her daughter, Alina, held out hope a bit longer, she said, until the call with the US Coast Guard that informed them debris from the sub had been found.
Mrs Dawood also revealed Suleman had taken a Rubik’s cube with him on the ill-fated voyage, and was “so excited” to attempt to make a world record by solving the puzzle 3,700 metres below the ocean surface.
Meanwhile his father Shahzada, a businessman, was “so excited he was like a child” at the prospect of seeing the Titanic wreckage.
Suleman, a student at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, had applied to Guinness World Records and his father, a London businessman who also died in the tragedy, had brought a camera with him to capture the moment.
Mrs Dawood said her son loved the famous puzzle so much that he carried it with him everywhere and dazzled onlookers by solving it in just 12 seconds.
“He said, ‘I’m going to solve the Rubik’s Cube 3,700 meters below sea at the Titanic’,” she told the BBC.
Mrs Dawood and her daughter returned to St John’s in Newfoundland, Canada on Saturday, and on Sunday held a funeral prayer for Shahzada and Suleman.
She said she and her daughter have vowed to try to learn to finish the Rubik’s Cube in Suleman’s honour, and she intends to continue her husband’s work.
“He was involved in so many things, he helped so many people and I think Alina and I really want to continue that legacy and give him that platform when his work has continued and it’s quite important for my daughter as well,” she said.
“Alina and I said we are going learn how to solve the Rubik’s cube. That’s going to be a challenge for us because we are really bad at it but we are going to learn it.”
