This photo provided by OceanGate Expeditions shows a submersible vessel named Titan used to visit the wreckage site of the Titanic. (OceanGate Expeditions via AP)
OceanGate has announced that the five people onboard a missing submersible have died.
“We now believe that our CEO Stockton Rush, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood, Hamish Harding, and Paul-Henri Nargeolet, have sadly been lost,” the company said in a statement obtained by PEOPLE magazine.
The Coast Guard said debris was found by a remotely-operated vehicle on the sea floor near the Titanic—the debris was consistent with the catastrophic loss of pressure in the ‘Titan’ chamber.
The Titan submarine vanished Sunday morning with five people onboard—they each paid around $250,000 in the hope of seeing the Titanic shipwreck. The Titan lost contact with its surface vessel, the Polar Prince, around 1 hour and 45 minutes into its dive, about 900 miles east of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and around 400 miles southeast of St John’s, in Canada’s Newfoundland.
A man reads a copy of a morning newspaper which reports missing Titanic submersible and onboard five people, including Pakistani nationals Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman, at a stall, in Karachi, Pakistan (AP Photo/Fareed Khan)