The US Coast Guard said on Wednesday it has likely recovered human remains from the wreckage of the Titan submersible and is bringing the evidence back to the United States, The Associated Press reported.
In a statement, the Coast Guard said it had recovered debris and evidence from the sea floor and that included what it described as presumed human remains.
“I am grateful for the coordinated international and interagency support to recover and preserve this vital evidence at extreme offshore distances and depths,” US Coast Guard Chief Capt. Jason Neubauer said in a statement.
“The evidence will provide investigators from several international jurisdictions with critical insights into the cause of this tragedy. There is still a substantial amount of work to be done to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of the TITAN and help ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again,” he added.
Earlier on Wednesday, debris from the Titan submersible was returned to land. The return of the debris to port in St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, is a key piece of the investigation into why the submersible imploded.
The Titan went missing on Sunday, June 18, while on its way to the wreckage of the HMS Titanic, 12,500 feet below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean. A multi-day search ended last Thursday when a debris field consistent with the submersible was discovered several hundred feet from the Titanic's final resting place, confirming that the craft had suffered an implosion.
OceanGate Expeditions, the company that owned and operated the submersible, said in a statement that all five people in the vessel, including company CEO and founder Stockton Rush, “have sadly been lost.”
The others on board were two members of a prominent Pakistani family, Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son Suleman Dawood; British adventurer Hamish Harding; and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet.
OceanGate and Rush have been accused of ignoring safety concerns over the quality of their submersible, which was made of a carbon fiber and titanium alloy. Experts had warned that carbon fiber had not been properly tested for the intense water pressure all craft encounter at depths of 12,500 feet, which is 400 times greater than the pressure on the ocean surface.