Relatives of doomed Titan submariners were kept in the dark about the vessel’s implosion for days, as reports of ‘banging’ gave them hope before the tragic truth emerged.
John Paschall, stepson of Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, said the French sub pilot was ‘fearless’ and a ‘warm burst of energy’.
Mr Paschall added he feels like he’s been ‘living a nightmare’ in the past few days.
Speaking from his home in Minnesota, Mr Paschall told Sky News: ‘As you can probably imagine, to me I feel like I’ve been living a nightmare. Just every day, every bit of info, you hang on to it – from noises to other info and we were just so hopeful.
‘And I think that’s what was carrying us through the early stages and even into Thursday morning.
‘We were just so hopeful that with the right equipment [getting] there they’d be able to find the Titan intact with them in there and they’d still be here with us.’
John Paschall, stepson of Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, said the French sub pilot was ‘fearless’ and a ‘warm burst of energy’
Mr Nargeolet was an experienced sub pilot and had taken numerous trips to the wreck before.
He was a former commander who served in the French Navy for 25 years and was one of five who died on board the OceanGate submersible.
Elsewhere, a woman who lost two family members on the Oceangate Titan disaster says she has also endured an ‘excruciating’ wait for information.
Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son Suleman were on board the doomed submersible Titan when it imploded. Wreckage found yesterday suggests the tragedy happened just hours after they went into the water on Sunday.
‘It was very sad but a tremendous relief to hear that on Sunday it was just… the end. They didn’t even know,’ said Azmeh Dawood, Shahzada’s sister.
‘They were still just enjoying it. That is the best for them,’ she told the Daily Mail while holding back tears at her home in Amsterdam today. ‘If you are a parent and you think for Father’s day, for something nice, I’ve brought my son here…. At least he didn’t have to suffer from the guilt,’ she said.
‘My brother is prone to panic attacks. I couldn’t stop thinking about that,’ she added, saying she was ‘glad that Suleman didn’t have to live through seeing his father struggling or feeling guilt.’
Azmeh Dawood, pictured outside her home in Amsterdam, said she was angry her brother Shahzada took her nephew Suleman on board the submersible titan
Azmeh said her brother Shahzada (left) was prone to panic attacks and she was relieved the end came quickly for him and her nephew Suleman (right)
She found out the men were missing on Monday evening. Ms Dawood said: ‘The days waiting to discover their fate were excruciating.
‘You have to hope but it’s a very nasty hope, because if they are alive they weren’t having a good time, they were suffering, they were in fear, they were terrified, waiting, gasping for every breath.’
Ms Dawood is particularly upset about the fate of her ‘sweet, precious’ nephew Suleman, who was following his father’s dream. ‘Suleman didn’t have $250,000 or an interest in the Titanic. An interest because his father loved it but his interests were different.’
Ms Dawood was particularly close to Suleman as he was only five days younger than her own son. When they would go to a waterpark in Dubai, people thought the boys were twins. Estranged from most of her family over the past decade, Suleman was one of the few family members to stay in touch, sending messages saying, ‘I miss you like crazy.’ He last looked at his phone at 11am on Sunday morning, she says.
Dawood said that the two men were ‘heroes’. ‘Shahazada was obsessed with the Titanic all his life, and he has become part of its history. He has aced that dream. I wish it was Suleman’s choice if he wanted to be a legend,’ she said bitterly.
Commander Paul-Henry Nargeolet, an expert on the Titanic, also lost his life in the Titan tragedy
‘If at 48 you want to do an adventure and risk your life, you can choose to that, but he was just a 19-year old,’ she said of her nephew.
‘Clearly he thought it was no big deal to take his son.’ The disclaimer mentions the chance of death 3 times on the first page, she added. ‘You do what you like but if talking about a child, you have to be really sure to ask your child.’
Ms Dawood says she is shocked that the company would take a child so young. His age would have been on the paperwork. ‘You need to be 21 to have a drink in America,’ she said. ‘He was 19, just starting university. He is a trusting child whose father said it was good. And his father trusted the company.’
Shahzada, Azmeh and two more siblings grew up in Pakistan watching the 1958 film about the Titanic A Night to Remember.
‘It was the only videotape we owned, we would watch it almost every afternoon,’ she says. The film led to an obsession with Titanic for her brother Shahzada.
Shahzada had an appetite for high risk travel and was planning to travel to space, Dawood said of her billionaire brother.
‘He was a conservative, gentle, balanced, level-headed man but sometimes he would do things that were tremendously out there,’ she says.
He had taken his whole family on a trip to Antarctica. While there, father and son completed a deep dive. His parents were also supposed to go, but dropped out when they discovered how strenuous it would be.
‘A lot of people had to suffer for Shahzada’s adventurous spirit. The whole world paid a price.’
Hamish Harding’s cousin Kathleen Cosnett wrote: ‘It’s quite poignant that tomorrow would have been his birthday. His father died in June and my father died in June too’
Oceangate CEO Stockton Rush led the expedition last Sunday, which is known to have resulted in the deaths of all five men on board
A relative of another of the men who died onboard the OceanGate Titan told media how he would have been celebrating his birthday tomorrow.
Billionaire Hamish Harding, who made his fortune buying and selling aircraft in the aviation industry, would have been turning 59 years old on Saturday.
The tycoon hit the headlines this week as he was named as one of the five men who had paid huge sums each to board the submersible and visit the ‘graveyard Titanic’ 16,000ft below sea level.
Mr Harding’s cousin, Kathleen Cosnett, said at her home in Twyford, Berkshire: ‘The emergency response was definitely not fast enough – at all. The hours that were lost before the alarm was raised, were at a great, great cost.
‘It was handled so badly, there should have been a lot better communication than there was,’ she observed.
‘There is a big difference in your distress if you need help immediately. You wouldn’t want all the hours that you have left of oxygen to tick by.
‘Now we know that it likely imploded on the descent, it is really the best outcome. They would have not known it was coming.
‘In a way, it is the best way to go, as he didn’t know it was happening. It’s really the best way to go isn’t it, being killed and knowing nothing about it?
‘It’s quite poignant that tomorrow would have been his birthday. His father died in June and my father died in June too.
‘It’s going to be especially hard for his family. Hamish was a devoted father and his two sons, Giles and Roy, who are taking the most important exams of their lives at the moment – his eldest is sitting A-Levels and the youngest is doing GCSEs.’
Kathleen described Hamish growing up.
‘As a boy, he had bright blond hair and sparkling blue eyes – and has always had a keen sense of adventure.’
She said: ‘Adventure was very important to him. From a young age until about eight years old he was this blond-haired blue-eyed baby. He was the real apple of his mother’s eye, well as an only child.
‘I last saw him in about 2002, he took us on a private aeroplane and he was the pilot. We started at a small-ish airport, well small for a commercial plane, at Booker aerodrome near High Wycombe and flew over Silverstone and on to France.
‘When my daughter was younger, she loved rollercoasters and adventure. Hamish flew her over to America and took her to Six Flags theme park.’
Hamish, who studied chemical engineering at Cambridge University, was also one of the five people to go into space on the brand new suborbital Blue Origin NS-21 mission on June 4, 2022.
Kathleen said: ‘Adventure was really important to him. He was in the Guinness Book of Records for going into space – I don’t think he was doing the same record for this one.
‘He was daring, he had a total fascination with this kind of thing. I wouldn’t want to go to the Titanic, it’s a graveyard, thousands of people were killed there.
‘If you speak to his wife Linda, she will say he’s a daredevil too. The family has flown out there to be in Canada in the same vicinity as him.’
Ms Cosnett added that she had not been told anything about the tragic news and only learned about her cousin’s fate after listening to the television news.
She said: ‘I’m not that close with my family any more. I saw everything happen on the news, I wasn’t told anything by any officials – certainly not by OceanGate. They would have spoken more to his partner and children, I suppose.
‘My daughter still talks to her cousin Robert who says they’ve gone to Canada now to be closer and in the same vicinity of the incident.’
She explained that she did not mind finding out about what happened via news organisations, as the situation was an emergency and not everybody could be contacted. Although she was heartbroken that Hamish could not be saved, she added: ‘He did die doing what he loved. That’s what his family have said too and we all agree.’
