Christine, the mother of Suleman, 19, a teenage student of Strathclyde University, who died in the Titan sub disaster together with her multi-millionaire husband, Shahzada Dawood, revealed how she escaped death from the doomed voyage.
The mother of two originally intended to go on this year’s OceanGate Expeditions mission trip, but later decided to give up her spot to her son who also desired to be on the trip as well, Daily Mail reported on Monday.
She and her multi-millionaire husband initially booked a trip to the Titanic wreck for themselves but had to cancel due to the pandemic.
Christine said, “We all thought they were just going to come up so that shock was delayed by about 10 hours or so.
“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.