'Presumed' human remains found in Titan wreckage

OTTAWA — Presumed human remains and debris from the tourist submersible crushed to pieces in an undersea implosion that killed all five people aboard were recovered from the ocean bottom and brought ashore to Canada on Wednesday, the United States Coast Guard said.

The possible remains and shattered bits of the submersible Titan, destroyed while diving to the century-old wreck of the Titanic, were carried to St. John's, Newfoundland, about 650 kilometers north of the accident site, by the Canadian-flagged vessel Horizon Arctic, the Coast Guard said.

"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," Captain Jason Neubauer, chief investigator with the US Coast Guard, said in a statement released late on Wednesday afternoon.

The evidence will be transported by a Coast Guard vessel to a US port for analysis and testing by a marine board of investigation, convened by the guard this week, to conduct a formal inquiry into the loss of the Titan, the agency said.

US 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 statement said.

The nature and extent of the possible remains recovered from the site were not specified.

Television images showed what appeared to be the Titan sub's nose cone and a side panel with electronics and wires hanging out being hoisted from the Horizon Arctic onto a flatbed truck on Wednesday morning at a Canadian Coast Guard terminal in St. John's, where the expedition to the Titanic had begun.

Examination of the debris is expected to shed more light on the cause of the catastrophic implosion that shattered the Titan earlier this month as the 6.7-meter vessel carried five people on a voyage to the Titanic shipwreck in the North Atlantic.

Agencies via Xinhua