A former friend of the late OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush has branded the ill-fated Titan sub a ‘mouse trap for billionaires’.
The Titan vessel lost contact with its mothership shortly after setting off on Sunday 19 June, prompting a huge search operation.
But after days of searching, the US Coast Guard announced that debris from the vessel had been found near to the wreckage of the Titanic off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, and that the submersible had suffered a 'catastrophic implosion'.
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CEO Rush died alongside British billionaire Hamish Harding, French diver Paul-Henry Nargeolet, and father and son Shahzada and Suleman Dawood.
In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia earlier this week, Karl Stanley, who operates submarines and went on a trip in Titan back in 2019, accused Rush of murdering those onboard and claims he was happy to risk his own life as well as the lives of others.
During an interview with 60 Minutes Australia, Stanley was asked if Rush had a ‘death wish’, to which he replied: “The only question is, ‘When?’ He was risking his life and his customers’ lives to go down in history. He’s more famous now than anything else he would’ve done.
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“He quite literally and figuratively went out with the biggest bang in human history that you could go out with, and who was the last person to murder two billionaires at once, and have them pay for the privilege?”
When asked what he believed had caused the implosion, Stanley replied: “There’s no doubt in my mind that it was the carbon fiber tube that was the mechanical part that failed.”
Stanley went with Rush on a test drive of the Titan in 2019 off the coast of the Bahamas, during which he claims he heard ‘loud, gunshot-like noises … every three to four minutes’.
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Stanley says that following the trip he reached out to Rush in a series of calls and emails to warn him about the noise.
“There is an area of the hull that is breaking down. It will only get worse,” he wrote to Rush in 2019.
Stanley added: “I literally painted a picture of his wrecked sub at the bottom [of the ocean] and even that wasn’t enough.”
OceanGate has since suspended business and exploration operations two weeks after five people lost their lives on one of its submersibles.
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An announcement on the site currently states: "OceanGate has suspended all exploration and commercial operations."
Claire Reid