Suleman Dawood was "terrified" of the Oceangate dive to the wreck of the Titanic, his devastated aunt has revealed.
Azmeh Dawood, who lives in Amsterdam, has shared how she has been left "crippled" by the idea of what her nephew and brother, Suleman's father Shahzada, must have been feeling in their final moments on board the submersible Titan, which lost contact with its mother ship less than two hours after setting out to the wreck of the 1912 ship on Sunday June 19.
"I am thinking of Suleman, who is 19, in there, just perhaps gasping for breath ... It's been crippling, to be honest," she told NBC News,, adding that her nephew had revealed weeks prior that he "wasn't very up for it" and felt "terrified".
However, because the trip fell over Father's Day weekend, Azmeh said he was eager to please his dad who had been a lifelong fan of the Titanic lore and spent half a million dollars for him and his son to visit the site at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.
Titanic sank in April 1912 after hitting an iceberg in the North Atlantic on its maiden voyage and killing approximately 1,500 passengers and crew. On Sunday June 19 2023 five passengers including CEO of Oceangate Stockton Rush sat inside the submersible Titan for a trip down into the depths of the ocean to view the wreckage of Titanic. However, contact was lost after less than two hours, and for several days an inter-agency team led by the US Coast Guard searched the miles of waters.
A statement released Thursday June 22 from Oceangate read: "We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost."
The news came after the US Coast Guard, who had been helping to search the Atlantic ocean for the missing explorers, said it found a "debris field" in the search area. The debris was located on the ocean floor, roughly 500 meters off of the bow of the Titanic, and was "consistent with the catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber".
It has since emerged that many in the deep sea exploration community had concerns over the company's technology, and on Thursday June 22 director James Cameron remarked that he was "struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself".
"I am struck by the similarities to the Titanic disaster itself where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field," James told ABC News on Thursday afternoon, claiming that "a number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community wrote letters to the company saying what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers".