Photo: Christine and son Suleiman
‘I gave my space to my son’ – mother of student killed in Titanic sub
Christine, the mother of 19-year-old, Suleman, a student of Strathclyde University who died in the Titan sub catastrophe along with her wealthy husband, Shahzada Dawood, told how she survived the fatal voyage.
According to a report in the Daily Mail on Monday, the mother of two had originally planned to join the OceanGate expedition mission trip this year but ultimately opted to offer her spot to her son who also wanted to go.
She and her billionaire husband had originally planned a trip to the Titanic wreck for themselves, but the epidemic forced them to postpone the trip.
Christine said, “We all thought they were just going to come up so that shock was delayed by about 10 hours or so.
“They were both excited, I was really happy for them, they really wanted to do that for a very long time. It was suppose to be Shahzada and I going down, and then I stepped back and gave the space to Suleman.
“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 and there were so many actions the people on this sub can do in order to surface they would drop the weights, then the ascent would be slower, we were constantly looking at the surface. There was that hope.
“There were 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.
“We lost hope when the 96 hours had passed since her husband and son boarded the submersible.”
On Father’s Day, the Dawood family boarded the Polar Prince, the sub’s support vessel, hoping for the trip of a lifetime, but Christine and her daughter Alina, 17, were still on board when word came through on June 18 that communications with Titan conveying her son, husband, and other passengers had been lost.
