The five passengers of the “Titan”, the submarine wanted in the North Atlantic, are dead

The five passengers of the submarine wanted in the North Atlantic are dead, announced Thursday, June 22, the company OceanGate and the US Coast Guard. The three pieces of debris found on Thursday afternoon belonged to Titan, the Coast Guard also confirmed. The debris shows that the craft underwent a “catastrophic implosion”according to the same source.

A “debris field” was discovered near the wreckage of the titanic by a robot participating in international research, the coast guard announced on Thursday afternoon. “We now believe that our boss Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, Hamish Harding and Paul-Henri Nargeolet are sadly dead,” the company said in a statement.

A Frenchman on board the submarine

An American, a Frenchman, a Briton and two Pakistani-Britons dived into the abyss on Sunday aboard the Titan, submersible designed for five people and about 6.5 meters long. Contact with the craft was lost less than two hours after its departure.

Paul-Henri Nargeolet77, a specialist in deep-sea diving and a passion for maritime archeology, was the Frenchman on board this submarine. Explorer of the seabed, he had spent the first part of his career as a naval officer. Commander of the group of clearance divers in Cherbourg, he then became a submarine pilot in the French Navy, before moving on to maritime archeology, with the excavation of several wrecks. In 1986, he was appointed head of deep intervention submarines at the French Research Institute for the Exploitation of the Sea (Ifremer).

Since the search began on Sunday, details implicating OceanGate have emerged, with the company being singled out for potential negligence in the safety of its underwater tourism device.