The wife and mum of two of Titan sub victims has described the agonising wait after being told their tiny vessel had lost communications.
Christine Dawood - whose husband Shahzada and son Suleman set off for the once-in-a-lifetime trip on the morning of Sunday 19 of June - joined the pair for their launch and stayed aboard the Titan's mothership, the Polar Prince, with her daughter Alina throughout the horror ordeal.
Shortly after their descent, crew on the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker told Christine that they'd lost communications, triggering an enormous search and rescue effort that saw ships from all corners of the globe travelling hundreds of nautical miles to the distress site.
Though Alina always clung to hope that her dad and brother would be found, Christine said that when they got to the 96-hour mark she "lost hope".
She explained: "That's when I lost hope. That's when I sent the message to my family onshore, I said: 'I am preparing for the worst'."
As her interview with the BBC drew to a close, the grief-wracked mother wept as she said: "I miss them. I really, really miss them."
She also revealed during the interview that, contrary to earlier reports, Suleman, 19, couldn't wait to go on the trip - and even took his Rubik's Cube with him in the hopes of breaking the world record for completing it at the lowest depth.
Christine shared details of how the group tried to remain hopeful above surface.
She said they told themselves: "There were so many actions the people on this sub can do in order to surface... they would drop the weights, then the assent would be slower, we were constantly looking at the surface. There was that hope."
She said: "We all thought they are just going to come up so that shock was delayed by about 10 hours or so.
"By the time they were supposed to be up again, 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."
The pair were two of the five passengers to be killed in the tragedy that gripped the world.
Stockton Rush, 61, the CEO of the firm that owned the Titan, British explorer Hamish Harding, 58, and expert French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77.
Christine spent the tragic week on-board the Polar Prince, only returning to dry land when it docked on Saturday.
She claims that she had previously been booked on to a trip to the 3,800-metre deep dive site of the Titanic wreck, but it was cancelled during the pandemic.
"Then I stepped back and gave them space to set [Suleman] up, because he really wanted to go," she told the BBC.
Christine shared how the family, from Long Ditton in Surrey, had joked with each other and hugged before they said what would turn out to be their final goodbyes from the Polar Prince.
She told the BBC : "I was really happy for them because both of them, they really wanted to do that for a very long time.
“He said, 'I'm going to solve the Rubik's Cube 3,700 meters below sea at the Titanic'.
"I think I lost hope when we passed the 96 hours mark."
She went on to describe her husband, the son of one of Pakistan’s richest billionaires, as infectiously curious about the world around him.
Royal Canadian Mounted Police confirmed they are looking into the circumstances of the passengers' deaths .
Dr Dale Molé, a former Navy doctor, has claimed that the final moments for the crew of the submarine would have been quick and painless.
He said: "It would have been so sudden, that they wouldn't even have known that there was a problem, or what happened to them.
