“Suspected human remains” have been discovered among the wreckage of the missing sightseeing submersible with five people on board in the North Atlantic near the wreck of the Titanic, the US Coast Guard said in a statement Wednesday (June 28th).

These remains, “carefully collected from the wreckage at the crash site”, as well as the remains of the craft found will be analyzed, which should provide “crucial elements for understanding the cause of this tragedy”. , said Captain Jason Neubauer, who is leading the Coast Guard investigation into the tragedy.

The Titan, a small submersible about 6.5 meters long and operated by a private company, had dived on June 18 to observe the wreckage of the Titanic and was due to resurface seven hours later, but contact was lost less two hours after his departure.

A vast rescue operation was then engaged to try to save the passengers of the craft, supposed to have air reserves for about four days, to finally discover that the submersible had, shortly after its dive, been hit by a ” catastrophic implosion” killing all five men instantly.

Debris from the Titan, found on the seabed some 500 meters from the wreckage of the Titanic and at a depth of nearly 4,000 meters, was brought back to land on Wednesday in Saint John of Newfoundland, the capital of the province of Newfoundland and Labrador, in eastern Canada.

They should now be transferred by a US Coast Guard vessel to a port in the United States, where investigators can analyze them.

“Crucial Evidence”

Canadian media showed pieces of what appeared to be the submersible’s nose and parts of the hull.

One of the managers of the company Pelagic Research Services, which had deployed its underwater remote-controlled robot (ROV) to scan the bottom of the Atlantic, confirmed that it had completed its operations. “We have finished our part at sea,” their spokesman, Jeff Mahoney, told Agence France-Presse.

“This was an extremely risky operation, both for the ROV and for the crew, who worked around the clock with virtually no sleep for the duration of the operation,” he said. continued, confirming that all teams were now returning to the United States.

Captain Jason Neubauer praised international and interagency efforts “to recover and preserve this crucial evidence at extreme distance from shore and at extreme depths,” according to the U.S. Coast Guard statement. Several investigations have been opened by Canada and the United States to determine the causes of the implosion of the submersible.

Critics multiplied after the Titan’s disappearance on possible negligence by the company Oceangate Expeditions in its design. A former manager of the company had in particular expressed serious doubts about the safety of the device, whose only porthole would not have been designed to withstand such depths.

“Much work remains to understand the factors that led to the catastrophic loss of the Titan and help ensure that such a tragedy never happens again,” Captain Neubauer concluded Wednesday.