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“Presumed human remains” were pulled from debris tied to the OceanGate submersible that imploded en route to the Titanic wreckage 10 days ago, the US Coast Guard said Wednesday.
All five people on board the Titan sub died during its deep-sea exploration on June 18.
“United States medical professionals will conduct a formal analysis of presumed human remains that have been carefully recovered within the wreckage at the site of the incident,” the Coast Guard said in a statement.
The five victims were OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush, 61, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, British billionaire Hamish Harding, 58, prominent Pakistani businessman Shahzada Dawood, 48, and his 19-year-old son, Sulaiman Dawood.
Before they were declared dead, the furious search effort for the then-presumed missing Titan vessel before it ran out of oxygen captivated the world.
Rush, who was piloting the 22-foot submersible, has since faced unwavering scrutiny for seemingly ignoring major safety concerns while charging wealthy tourists to pay $250,000 each for a trip to see the famed ship that sank in 1912.
The Coast Guard said it received debris and evidence from the seafloor at the site of the Titan catastrophe when the ship arrived in Canada Wednesday.
Large chunks of the mangled wreckage were seen as it was hauled ashore by crane from a recovery ship after it docked.
The debris was recovered by Pelagic Research Services, a US company, that said its crew on the Horizon Artic has been “working around the clock now for ten days” through “physical and mental challenges.”
It used specialized remote-operated vehicles to locate the destroyed sub about 12,500 feet underwater and several hundred feet from the Titanic wreckage.
A massive probe was opened into the tragic implosion by the Coast Guard, with the US military branch stressing recovering debris from the wreckage would be “the priority.”
The Marine Board of Investigation is expected to move the evidence aboard a Coast Guard cutter to a US port where the MBI will figure out further analysis and testing, the Coast Guard said.
“I am grateful for the coordinated international and interagency support to recover and preserve this vital evidence at extreme offshore distances and depths,” MBI Chair Captain 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.”
Experts previously warned it was unlikely the bodies of the five passengers would be recovered.
Ofer Ketter, a longtime submersible specialist, told The Post last week the force of the implosion would have turned parts of the submersible “to dust.”
It’s unknown yet what caused the fatal implosion that was likely heard by a top-secret US Navy acoustic detection system hours after the Titan began its doomed descent, the Wall Street Journal reported last week.
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