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At the time of writing, the search for the 21-foot craft, known as the Titan, was entering its fourth day after it lost contact with Canadian research vessel Polar Prince on Sunday morning.
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The US Coast Guard and Royal Canadian Air Force had scrambled to locate the submersible over a vast 26,000-square-kilometre search zone in the ocean, which reaches four kilometres deep in some areas. US officials feared that the five passengers aboard, if still alive, had not much more than a day of oxygen left.
The Titan was carrying out a dive organised by OceanGate Expeditions, a private research and tourism company that has conducted trips to the Titanic wreck site. Its passengers reportedly pay $US250,000 a head to go on the journey.
Though the names of those on board had not been released by authorities, reporting confirmed that British businessman and explorer Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet and OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush were inside the Titan. So too were Shahzada Dawood, heir to one of Pakistan’s biggest private fortunes, and his teenage son Suleman.
“[They] had embarked on a journey to visit the remnants of the Titanic in the Atlantic Ocean,” the Dawood family said in a statement. “As of now, contact has been lost with their submersible craft and there is limited information available.”
On social media, some Pakistanis pointed to the grim spectacle of compatriots from opposite ends of a great socioeconomic divide disappearing in the watery depths at the same time.
Pakistan is in the middle of a devastating economic crisis, with the rate of inflation at a 50-year high, food shortages, energy blackouts and mounting unemployment. The conditions have compelled numerous people, especially among the poor, to seek a better life abroad.
“The desperate situation has led to the mushrooming growth of people smugglers in Pakistan,” wrote Zahid Shahab Ahmed, a senior research fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation in Australia.
“In exchange for large sums of money, they offer people transportation, fake documentation and other resources for a swift departure from the country.”
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“It is bad enough that the spectacular failure of the government to fulfil its part of the social contract by providing economic security to its citizens drives desperate individuals – even the educated ones – to leave the country,” noted a Monday editorial in Dawn, a Pakistani daily, further lamenting that “an inept, uncaring government has made little effort to crack down on a vast network of human smugglers who fleece desperate individuals and put them on a path strewn with hazards”.
Pakistani Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif declared Monday a national day of mourning, while authorities in various parts of the country arrested people suspected of links to human-trafficking networks.
“Our thoughts and prayers are with you, and we pray that the departed souls find eternal peace,” the chairman of Pakistan’s Senate, Muhammad Sadiq Sanjrani, said, vowing to take on the people smugglers.
That may be cold comfort to many Pakistanis, who live in what by some measures is South Asia’s most unequal society, one long dominated by influential, quasi-feudal potentates. Sharif himself is a scion of a political dynasty that also has huge business interests.
The Dawoods belong to the same world. Shahzada Dawood is vice chairman of Engro Corp, a major conglomerate that is a subsidiary of family-owned Dawood Hercules, fronted by his father, Hussain Dawood.
It’s a multibillion-dollar operation that sprawls across various sectors of Pakistan’s economy, including textiles, fertilisers, foods and energy. As a result, Engro has been the beneficiary of hefty government subsidies.
Both Dawood and Sharif were identified in the 2016 Panama Papers leak as among the dozens of Pakistani tycoons and politicos to possess secret offshore bank accounts.
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Dawood frequented the World Economic Forum, touted his vision for a “sustainable future” and business models that help uplift “low-income communities”. The Dawoods are also engaged in philanthropic work in Pakistan, the United Arab Emirates and Britain, where Shahzada Dawood and his immediate family are based as dual British-Pakistani citizens.
The hundreds of Pakistanis lost in the Mediterranean were chasing just a glimmer of that life.
Speaking to the Associated Press, Zohaib Shamraiz, a Pakistani man living in Barcelona, described his last conversation with his uncle, Nadeem Muhamm, who was still missing. Shamraiz’s uncle had left behind three young children in Pakistan to make a better life for his impoverished family.
“I spoke to him five minutes before he got on the boat,” Shamraiz told the AP. “I told him not to go. I was afraid. He said he had no choice.”
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