A grieving mother who lost her husband and teenage son in the ill-fated Titan submarine disaster has revealed that their remains were eventually returned to her as “clay” in small “shoeboxes”.
Christine Daoud – whose husband Shahzadeh and their 19-year-old son Suleiman were killed when their submarine exploded on their way to view the wreck of the Titanic in 2023 – said she had to endure an arduous wait for what was left of their remains.
“We didn’t get bodies for nine months,” she said. He told the Guardian From the dark return
“Well, when I say bodies, I mean what’s left of the mud. They came in two little boxes, like shoeboxes.”
Daoud, who was supposed to be on board the ill-fated submarine but gave up her place to her son at the last minute, said the so-called mud is all that investigators can recover from the seabed and then separate through DNA testing.
“There wasn’t much they could find,” she said.
“They have a big pile they can’t separate, all mixed DNA, and they asked me if I wanted some of that too. But I said no, just what you know is Suleiman and Shahzada.”
Shahzadeh and Suleiman were among the five people on board the submarine Titan when it suddenly exploded on its way to the famous wreck site at the bottom of the North Atlantic in June 2023.
The Titan set off on the morning of June 18, but lost contact with its support ship about two hours later.
Investigators concluded that the debris later found on the ocean floor — approximately 984 feet from the Titanic — was consistent with a “catastrophic implosion.”
Daoud said: The first thing I thought of was thank God. “When they said it was a disaster, I knew that Shahzada and Suleiman did not even know about it. One moment they were there, the next they were not there.”
“Knowing that they didn’t suffer was very important. They’re gone, but the way they’re gone makes it easier in a way,” she added.