The mother of Suleman Dawood, the 19-year-old who died on board the Titanic tourist submersible, has said she gave him her spot on the vessel because he ‘really wanted to go’.

Suleman and his dad Shahzada were two of the five passengers who were killed when the OceanGate submarine suffered a ‘catastrophic implosion’ as it sank to the wreck of the Titanic last week.

The pair took the trip together as part of a Father’s Day gift, which had been postponed due to the Covid pandemic.

Speaking to the BBC, Christine Dawood said she had originally planned to make the journey with her husband, a British-Pakistani businessman, but gave her place to her son instead.

She said: ‘It was supposed to be Shahzada and I going down.

‘I stepped back and gave the place to Suleman because he really wanted to go.’

Asked how she felt about the decision, she simply said: ‘Let’s just skip that.’

Mrs Dawood said Suleman had brought a Rubik’s Cube with him on the submersible so he could break a world record for the deepest solve.

He had applied to Guinness World Records, she said, and Mr Dawood had taken a camera to record his effort.

His mother said: ‘He would not go anywhere without his Rubik’s Cube.

‘He used to teach himself through YouTube how to solve the Rubik’s Cube, and he was really fast at it. I think his best was 12 seconds or something.’

She added: ‘He said, “I’m going to solve the Rubik’s Cube 3,700 meters below sea at the Titanic.”‘

Mrs Dawood and her 17-year-old daughter Alina were on the Titan’s mothership Polar Prince as the four-day search for the missing sub took place around them.

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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.

‘We had loads of hope, I think that was the only thing that got us through it because we were hoping and… we talked about things that pilots can do like dropping weights, there were so many actions people on the sub can do in order to surface.

‘We were constantly looking at the surface. There was so many things we would go through where we would think “it’s just slow right now, it’s slow right now”. But there was a lot of hope.’

She said she lost hope that her husband and son would be found alive when the 96-hour window for oxygen came to an end, but Alina stayed hopeful until the discovery of a ‘debris field’ was announced.

They held a funeral prayer for Suleman and Shazada yesterday.

Remembering Suleman, Mrs Dawood said: ‘He was involved in so many things, he helped so many people and I think Alina and I really want to continue that legacy and give him that platform when his work has continued and it’s quite important for my daughter as well.

‘Alina and I said we are going learn how to solve the Rubik’s cube. That’s going to be a challenge for us because we are really bad at it but we are going to learn it.’

The three other passengers on the Titan were British billionaire Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet and Stockton Rush, the CEO of Titan operator OceanGate.

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