Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, has issued a brief statement on social media following his meeting with the Iranian foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. “Had a most warm, cordial exchange of views on the current regional situation. We also discussed matters of mutual interest, including the further strengthening of Pakistan-Iran bilateral relations,” Sharif said.
As wildfires raged across Nova Scotia last summer, the Canadian province made a simple plea to residents: stay away from the woods. As the situation deteriorated, authorities turned the request into a prohibition: anyone caught hiking under the shade of the forest canopy faced a C$25,000 fine – a figure more than half the average worker’s yearly salary. But exactly the emergency rules considered to be “the woods” was a challenge better suited to a philosopher than a confused hiker in a parking lot. Rock barrens, scrubland or marshes were all considered “woods”. So too was forest – but the presence of actual trees wasn’t necessary, just evidence they had once been there. Residents could still travel as long as it wasn’t “any great distance” through the woods. “Someone who wanted to stay out of the woods had to put in some interpretive effort,” a judge recently declared. “The government just wanted people to use common sense. But the ban seemed to defy commonsense definitions.” Last week, that same judge found the controversial ban wasn’t just confounding, it also violated Canada’s charter of rights and freedoms. And while the Nova Scotia supreme court acknowledged the urgency of the wildfire crisis, it warned that if individual rights aren’t protected, “they can be eroded in a way that eventually affects everyone”. The chain of events, which ended in a scathing critique of government overreach, began last summer when the province was engulfed in flames. In July, Tim Houston, a stone-faced provincial premier, told the public that the ban on walking in the woods was “inconvenient” but essential to avoid a repeat of the disastrous 2023 wildfire season. Most people adhered to the order. But not Jeffrey Evely, an army veteran who saw an opportunity to challenge the ban. After letting bylaw officers know of his plans, he ventured into the forest in Cape Breton – and was promptly handed a C$28,872.50 fine. Aided by the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) – a libertarian-leaning group that has taken on controversial cases, including an active role in the self-described Freedom Convoy that besieged Toronto in 2022 – Evely and his supporters challenged the fine in court, and won. On 17 April, justice Jamie Campbell found the government had violated the mobility rights of Nova Scotians, and failed to weigh the cost of that breach against an attempt to stop the fires. Mobility is a protected right and has previously been called “the heart of what it means to be a free person” by courts. While governments can infringe or limit that right, courts have long demanded those efforts be taken with “reasonable” consideration of the effects. But Campbell found this wasn’t the case. At the same time, the province seemed keen to placate the concerns of industry groups such as forest operators, utilities and telecom companies, issuing permits for them to keep using the woods. “Those responsible for safeguarding … had to do something. They had to do it quickly and their options were limited,” he wrote. But he nonetheless also warned of the need to protect the rights of individuals. Campbell also found the order was “so vague as to be incapable of being interpreted at all”. “Being told to stay out of the ‘woods’ made some sense to people who thought they knew what the woods are,” he wrote. Nova Scotia’s premier defended his government’s actions during a fast-moving crisis. “I did what I thought was necessary as premier to support our firefighters, to keep people safe, to keep property safe, and that was the woods ban,” Houston said this week. “That was completely appropriate in those circumstances, in that moment, based on the information I had.” Marty Moore, the legal counsel for the JCCF, said the decision, which was “egg on the face of the government”, would probably deter others from pursuing similar measures. The JCCF takes on cases it believes are government overreach against free expression, religious freedom and individual liberty. It has also taken on controversial cases that centre on culture-war debates over gender identity and human rights law. For Moore, the case echoed themes of pandemic restrictions his organization actively fought. But he said the case also had deep roots – “all the way to the Magna Carta in England and the Charter of the Forest from 1271”- which granted rights to common people to use the forests. “Unless you’ve been to Nova Scotia and touched the forest there, it’s hard to understand the impact of what the travel ban looks like,” he said. “Nova Scotia is the woods.”
In the heart of ancient Athens, on narrow streets and around archaeological sites, visitor groups appear to be everywhere, snaking their way behind tour guides. Previously, officials would have welcomed such scenes. But for Haris Doukas, the socialist mayor who is determined to reclaim the capital’s congested city centre for its citizens, the start of tourist season leaves much of its historic heart at risk of “over-saturation.” Entire neighbourhoods, he believes, are in danger of losing their authenticity because of uncontrolled tourist development. “Athens cannot operate as if it were a giant hotel,” he said in an interview. “Restrictions and rules are needed. Cities must also have a say in the way they develop.” Last year, more than 8 million people visited Athens, a record for a metropolis that not long ago was regarded as a pit stop to the Greek isles. In short-term rentals alone, overnight stays in the popular Plaka district beneath the Acropolis have more than doubled since 2018, a study commissioned by the municipality recently revealed. In the city’s neo-classical town hall, officials say time is of the essence if Athens is not to fall victim to its own success. The warning signs are everywhere: from soaring property rents that have priced out local people, to overstretched infrastructure buckling under the pressure. “All of Athens is being dug up so that we can cope,” said Doukas, who was a climate energy professor before he went into local government. “We’re building electricity infrastructure, water systems, new drainage, 5G networks. When you have around 700,000 residents and 8 million visitors, the pressure is enormous.” Every month “more staff, more equipment, more machines” were being taken on to meet the challenges. Doukas assumed the post in 2024 after unexpectedly cruising to victory with the support of the main opposition Pasok party, on a pledge “to green” what is widely seen as the continent’s hottest capital. An estimated 3,855 trees have been planted around the 15 sq mile (39 sq km) municipality under his watch. But as Athens’ appeal has grown, the mayor has found himself coming head-to-head with the forces he blames squarely for “runaway development” in prime tourist spots. Doukas has had his sights on construction companies that are determined to erect multi-storey buildings at the foot of the 5th century BC Acropolis, as well as property investors and entrepreneurs. He is also taking aim at the proliferation of often unlicensed roof-top bars and eateries. The battle intensified this week as Doukas told the Guardian he would use a tourism land-use bill, currently under debate, to call for a blanket ban on new business activity in the city’s historical centre. “We’ll be stopping all tourist investment in Plaka, which I am on a mission to save. There’s no more room. Not for short-term rental, not for serviced apartments, not for hotels, or any other tourism use. The area is over-saturated,” he said. “We want to say ‘enough is enough’ in a bill that is enshrined in law.” Investors, he said, should head to other “less congested” areas of the capital. The mayor has also floated the idea of freezing construction permits for new hotels. That would follow a similar ban, introduced by the centre-right government, curbing short-term rentals in neighbourhoods within view of the Acropolis. To his surprise, this week he won support from an unexpected quarter. At an event promoting the capital on Tuesday, the head of the powerful hoteliers’ association, Evgenios Vassilikos, also raised the prospect of a cap on hotel construction, citing the example of Barcelona, which has not issued licences for new hotels since 2017. “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel,” said the hotelier, adding that the moment had come for the capital’s tourism sector to seriously contemplate where it wanted to be in 10 or 15 years’ time. The mayor said: “When the whole of Athens’ centre is turning into a hotel zone, I cannot be the only one saying it. Now that the president of the hoteliers’ association has weighed in, the discussion has officially begun. Athens cannot become [another] Barcelona.” Doukas has clearly been emboldened by Jaume Collboni, his left-wing counterpart in Barcelona, who recently announced a complete ban on short-term rentals from November 2028, when permits for more than 10,000 apartments will be rescinded in an attempt to make the city more livable for its residents. Both Athens and Barcelona are among 15 cities whose mayors have joined a European housing action plan that has urged the EU to take bold initiatives to address the crisis. Like Collboni, Doukas has described access to affordable housing – impossible for many because of short-term rental pressure – as the municipality’s biggest problem. “We’ve created a social housing office to identify buildings and apartments that we can renovate with EU funds,” he said. “We want to incentivise young couples to remain in the centre. While other cities are moving toward cement and skyscrapers, we’re moving in an altogether other direction, and that includes demolishing buildings to create public space for parks and playgrounds. Athens is for its people. It is not only for those who simply want to exploit it.”
Eve Middleton was sitting on a picnic blanket in a park, sharing out vegan biscuits with six fellow activists, when she saw a squad of police bearing down on them. About 30 officers, she said, surrounded the seven young people, and one officer told them: “Don’t run or you’ll be cuffed.” Another officer focused on gathering evidence. “Whose Oreos are these?” they asked, seizing the biscuits. “It was pretty farcical, but it’s still frightening when you see that amount of officers running towards you. It’s pretty scary,” said student Bridie Leggatt, another of the seven. The seven activists had gathered for a “nonviolence training event” – meeting in the park to enjoy the sunny weather. Leggatt, 22, and Middleton, 25, were among 13 people arrested last weekend in Salford and London as part of a national police crackdown on a new civil resistance group called Take Back Power. A further 15 arrests had been made in March when police raided a “nonviolence training” event, this time at the Grade II-listed Quaker House in Westminster. They were all held on suspicion of conspiracy to commit theft, police said, linked to Take Back Power’s campaign of “mass shoplifting” in supermarkets across Britain in a protest against inequality. On TikTok, the group’s videos show activists of all ages “liberating” rice, pasta, beans, nappies, stock cubes and tinned fruit from supermarkets in Cornwall, London and Manchester. They pile the goods into cardboard boxes branded with the message: “These things are going to those who need them.” The items are then distributed at local food banks – if they manage to get past security. Even by today’s standards of shoplifting, when supermarket thefts have reached record highs, the mass looting is quite brazen. Steph Parker, an assistant chief constable at Greater Manchester police, said forces would take “robust action to disrupt this type of organised criminality and it will not be tolerated”. Middleton and her six comrades were held in custody for 24 hours before being released on Monday. For Middleton, like many of the activists, this is not her first encounter with the law. Many of those involved with the group are seasoned activists – despite being in their early 20s – having taking part in actions with Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil, Animal Rising and other groups in recent years. Neither Middleton or Leggatt wanted to say how many times they had been arrested as they feared a telling off from their parents. Take Back Power announced itself in December when activists threw custard and apple crumble at a case containing the crown jewels at the Tower of London. Eight people were charged with criminal damage over the stunts, with four due to appear before Westminster magistrates court on Monday. The group said a total of 50 people had been arrested since December, with the majority detained while taking part in “nonviolence training” events. On its website, activists are invited to join upcoming action in London “targeting the luxury lifestyle of the super-rich” by “occupying where they play and shop”. A spokesperson for Take Back Power, who would only give his name as James due to the risk of arrest, said the group planned further headline-grabbing stunts this year with the aim of focusing attention on Britain’s deepening inequality. James said the organisation, which wants to see higher taxes levied on the rich and a legally binding citizens’ assembly, had no leader “as such”. It has raised more than £65,000 in donations in the past four months, according to a fundraising page. Another of those arrested last weekend, who would only give his name as Mark, said mass shoplifting would have “no real effect” on supermarkets who make billions of pounds in profit. “Supermarkets are profiting off other people’s misery and we can’t put up with that,” said Middleton, pointing out that Tesco’s chief executive, Ken Murphy, was paid £9.2m last year, about 400 times that of the shop’s typical worker. What about the effect on low-paid staff? Will they not risk losing their jobs if mass shoplifting has an effect on company profits? “It shouldn’t be staff that get cut,” said Mark, 44, who works in education. “What should get cut are the obscene profits and salaries of the chief executives.” The vegan picnic raided by police last weekend was in Salford’s Peel Park – named after Sir Robert Peel, the founder of modern law enforcement whose philosophy of “policing by consent” is a guiding principle of forces today, recognising that those in uniform operate on the basis of public trust rather than fear or force. Yet the arrests of activists at a training event – rather than for a specific act – appears to run counter to that principle, said Middleton. Parliament’s joint committee on human rights has condemned legislative changes in recent years that it said (pdf) have had “a chilling effect” on the right to protest in England and Wales. Middleton said the arrests on suspicion of being involved in a conspiracy was part of a wider “repression” of civil resistance in Britain. “Other groups were able to take part in training without everyone getting arrested,” she said. “For doing not as much, the risk of prison is a lot higher.” James, the Take Back Power spokesperson, said the group planned to build up its action with the aim of pushing inequality to the top of the agenda by the next general election, which has to be held by August 2029. Middleton believes the police crackdown is a sign that the authorities are scared. “They can see that Take Back Power does speak to a lot of this country’s people [who are] fed up with inequality. They are scared of what it could become.”
On 17 April 1936, the bells of St Laurentius church in the Black Forest rang out to guide to safety a group of London schoolboys trapped in deep snow on a mountain hike gone very wrong. Ninety years on to the day, as the bells sounded again, there was hardly a dry eye in the congregation of British relatives and German villagers remembering the night that had brought together their parents and grandparents. The people of Hofsgrund risked their lives heading out with sledges and lanterns in the deadly weather to rescue the party of 27 and their teacher after two boys, fumbling though fog and frozen to the bone, had reached a farmhouse and told its startled inhabitants there were many more of them strewn over the Schauinsland mountain. The Daily Sketch from 20 and 29 April 1936 But it was the Hitler Youth Organisation that would claim credit for the action, in a propaganda coup ceremoniously flanking the coffins of the five boys who perished in what local people refer to as the Engländerunglück (English Misfortune) before they were transported on trains back to London. Those images dominated the headlines and went around the world. Jenny Davies, the daughter of Douglas Mortifee, who as a 17-year-old had reached the farmhouse clad in shorts and sandals – dressed the same as the other boys when they had set out from their hostel with just two buttered rolls and nothing to drink – said it was finally time to pay tribute to the villagers of Hofsgrund and correct the historical record once and for all. Jenny Davies (right), the daughter of Douglas Mortifee, who was one of the boys to raise the alarm “Without your help we would not be here now,” she said in an emotional address from the church pulpit, speaking on behalf of relatives of five of the 22 survivors and a niece of one of the deceased at a ceremony to mark the anniversary attended by the parish priest and a village brass band. The Nazis’ hijacking of the narrative, in which they were able to feign feelings of friendship towards Britain, was supported by promoters of Britain’s appeasement efforts to prevent the second world war. It also allowed the boys’ teacher, Kenneth Keast, then 27, to get off the hook. Equipped with a tiny scale 1:100,000 map and a compass he did not know how to use, he had set out on the hike despite minus temperatures, snowfall and repeated warnings from local people who knew their weather and urged him to turn back. Afterwards, charges were dropped in Germany, and British newspapers portrayed him as the “man of the hour” without whom more boys would have died, although UK authorities did ban him from taking further school trips abroad. Ninety years on, and in better weather, relatives and villagers retraced part of the boys’ route on the mountain path, visiting a bombastic, rune-style monument erected by the Nazis as well as a modest stone cross on a grassy slope close to the spot where Jack Eaton, 14 years and 10 months old, had collapsed and died metres from the village. That cross has slowly gained recognition as the true memorial to the boys of Strand school in Brixton Hill, south London. It was commissioned by the father of Jack, the school’s boxing champion, who had flown to Germany determined to find out who was responsible for the death of his only son. Nancy Whelan, Jack’s niece, visited the spot for the first time on the anniversary, touching its lichen-mottled inscription as she fought back tears. “My nan [Jack’s mother] and my mother, Jacqueline, who was named after Jack, always said they just wanted the truth to come out,” she said. A blank space on the cross shows where Nazi authorities forced Jack’s father to remove words blaming the teacher, as it impugned the official narrative. Nancy Whelan (right) and three relatives of Norman Hearn study the Eaton memorial Ewald Lorenz welcomed the boys’ relatives at the Dobelhof farmyard where Douglas Mortifee and RGS Farrants had sought help. His grandparents, Elisabeth and Bernhard Lorenz, had brought the hypothermic boys into the safety of their wood-panelled parlour and urged them to stand some distance from the dark green ceramic oven, which still dominates the room, so as to not rewarm too quickly. Ewald Lorenz at the front door of the Dobelhof farmhouse in Hofsgrund The grandparents of Ewald Lorenz Everyone in the village has their own story to tell of that night. “We know to always have an open door and an open mind,” Lorenz said. In the wood-beamed village hall, local people and the families swap stories after the hike. The rescuers included Bruno Lorenz, the village cobbler, who, his son Kurt recalled, said of that night: “The snow and wind was monstrous.” Kurt Lorenz, whose father, Bruno, the village cobbler, was involved in the rescue effort, listens to speeches at the Hofsgrund community centre Marius Buhl, a local journalist, said he wished he had had the chance to ask his grandfather Reinhold Gutmann about his role in the rescue, but the village had only truly realised the significance of the event after the publication of research byBernd Hainmüller, a retired teacher from nearby Freiburg, who spent 26 years unearthing the real story behind the tragedy. “We lived with the towering monument right in front of our noses, but it took an outsider to really bring the story to our attention,” Buhl said. Marius Buhl, a Hofsgrunder whose grandfather was involved in the rescue effort, speaks during the memorial service in the local Catholic church “The rescuers never talked much about it,” said Paula Gnaehrich, whose grandfather, Ignatz Schelb, had carried the boys on a horn sledge back into the valley. “But it was always something of interest to us youngsters. We often thought of the children, and I was always shocked that the teacher might have ignored the warnings of Black Forest locals who are always going to know their heimat and its weather better than a visiting Londoner, however clever he thinks he is.” Vanessa Barton, the daughter of Russell Petty, who was 16 at the time, quoted her father’s account of the hike and how “the wind and snow together were felling small trees”. She said: “On family holidays he never took us anywhere it was snowing, and certainly not up a mountain.” Julia and Lucy Warner had brought with them the pencil-written diary of the youngest survivor, their grandfather Ken Osborne, and donated it to the local museum along with the postcard he had sent to his parents after the event. “We got lost. It might be in the papers and so we have been told to write and say that I am quite safe,” it said. A Guardian long read published soon after the 80th anniversary brought Hainmüller’s work to a wider audience, prompting many relatives of the schoolboys to contact him – connections that eventually led to the memorial meeting. Research by the Guardian’s Richard Nelsson in UK archives also uncovered a paper trail now central to the understanding of events. The Catholic church of Hofsgrund Over kaffee und kuchen the families swapped stories and shared photos, letters, diaries and newspaper cuttings, piecing together details such as who carried whom off the mountain, and where and when the boys subsequently served in the war. Russell Petty had carried Peter Ellerkamp, who was one of those to die. Stephen Hearn said he was reasonably sure his father, Norman Hearn, had put Ken Osborne, the smallest boy, on his shoulders. “My dad only ever gave us snippets of information when we were young,” Hearn said. “He simply told us he had nearly lost his thumbs due to frostbite trying to rescue a boy off the top of a mountain.” It was only 27 years after his father’s death that Hearn looked through two boxes of documents from his life, found the Guardian article through a web search and “realised what I’d stumbled across”. In October 2024 he sent the information to Hainmüller, who helped him piece together the puzzle. Speeches at an exhibition on the tragedy in the community hall Norman Hearn, like one other survivor, Stanley Few, refused to fight against the Germans when war broke out, insisting it was Germans who had saved their lives. Both were sent to Asia instead. It was noted also that several of the rescuers went to war and never came back, two of them killed at the Battle of Stalingrad. Kevin Mitchell, visiting Hofsgrund with his father, Max, whose late brother Hubert had survived the hike, said he felt a great sense of satisfaction. “Most of us had the big picture, but the pleasure has been in the minutiae we’ve been able to share.” The parlour of the Dobelhof farmhouse with the original oven. Apart from the kitchen, this was the only heated room in the house. In a video message from Perth, Australia, Debra Cadee, the daughter of Donald Hooke, another survivor, said: “I can remember Dad telling us ‘the tolling of the bells saved us’.” She said he suffered from the effects of frostbite for the rest of his life. The local mayor, Hanspeter Rees, has promised that Jack Eaton’s father’s inscription – “their teacher failed them in the hour of trial” – will soon be re-engraved on the monument. Whelan said: “After nine decades, I feel my family’s painful attempts to get to the truth have finally paid off.” • This article was amended on 25 April 2026. The mayor is Hanspeter Rees, not Klaus Vosberg as stated in an earlier version. Also, the spellings of Paula Gnaehrich and Ignatz Schelb’s surnames were corrected.
Walking into Christine Dawood’s kitchen, it’s impossible not to be drawn to the model Titanic in the centre of the room. Sitting in its own glass-fronted cabinet, the Lego ship is almost 1.5 metres long, constructed of 9,090 of the iconic plastic bricks. Dawood’s 19-year-old son Suleman spent almost two weeks building it. “People are always a bit shocked to see it,” she admits. “But what was I going to do? Break it up? Hide it away? Suleman put all those hours in. He’d been fascinated with the Titanic since we went to a huge exhibition when we lived in Singapore.“ I went to that same exhibition when it came to London, and remember marvelling at the china dinner plates that had survived intact; the unused lifejackets that had failed to save someone; the sheet music belonging to the orchestra who had supposedly bravely played even as the ship went down. Instead of a ticket, you were given a replica boarding pass with a real passenger’s name on it. At the end, you could find out who survived and who didn’t. On 18 June 2023, Suleman Dawood died alongside his 48-year-old father, Shahzada, and three other men in the Titan submersible as it attempted to dive to the Titanic. They were 500 metres above the wreck when the submersible imploded. It was a horrifying tragedy that made headlines around the world. “The Titanic was claiming another five people, right?” Dawood says. “And the age of my son was a huge thing. Another reason why the press latched on to this, I think. If it had been five grown men, it might not have been as juicy.” We’re in the family home in Surrey where she lives with her 20-year-old daughter. Dawood is understandably protective of her. “I don’t want her to be known as that girl who lost her father and brother on the Titan,” she tells me. “She’s just starting her life and I prefer to leave her out. But she understands I do want to talk now.” Floor-to-ceiling windows take up an entire side of the room. She needs that sense of light and space, Dawood tells me, after growing up in the mountains of Bavaria. On the walls hang richly coloured Pakistani art, mostly gifts from her in-laws, to whom she remains extremely close. “I love this house still,” she tells me. “Even though they are not here any more.” Dawood, a trained psychologist, is speaking in detail for the first time; she has also written a book telling her story. A media frenzy broke out with the news that the Titan was missing. Rumours spread. Was the sub trapped in the wreck itself? Or floating adrift in the North Atlantic? Reports circulated that the stricken craft had just four days of oxygen. A countdown began; social media was gripped by the fate of the little sub. And as details emerged about the men onboard, word spread that Dawood should have been on the submersible herself, but had given the ticket to her son. Almost three years on, she holds close the advice she was given when she came ashore after the four-day search. “It was one of the Canadian Coast Guards,” she remembers. “A very experienced woman with blond hair – I forget her name – gave me the best advice I’ve ever gotten: ‘Hindsight won’t help you, so don’t fall into that trap. Just because you know it now … you didn’t know it before.’ I’ve always remembered her telling me that. Suleman wanted to go and I was happy to give up the seat. I was happy for him to make memories with his father. I can’t change that.” * * * During the 2020 lockdown, Dawood came across an advert for “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dive to the Titanic”. The family had recently bought a puppy, a bernese mountain dog called Stig, who is Dawood’s constant companion as we talk. “I was scrolling through my Instagram,” she recalls, “lots of puppy pictures and that type of thing, when a photo of a submersible popped up right next to the Titanic. I couldn’t believe it and I called Quintessentially, our personal travel agency. They called themselves lifestyle managers, in fact, and we paid them a pretty big yearly membership. We’d had incredible trips organised by them, to Antarctica and Greenland. So when they came back to me and said this was doable, we were excited.” OceanGate, founded by CEO Stockton Rush in 2009, was indeed promoting tourist dives to the famous wreck. The American’s mission was to democratise the deep ocean. In 2013, Rush began work on the Titan, a submersible he was convinced would be as indestructible as its namesake was claimed to be. The experimental construction flew in the face of tried-and-tested submersible design. The carbon fibre hull and cylindrical shape replaced the conventional but proven structures of titanium or high-strength steel spheres known to withstand the pressures of the deep. Initially, Dawood suggested they try a shallow dive, to get used to the feeling of being locked inside the 6.7-metre-long submersible. But Shahzada was adamant: he wanted to go straight to the Titanic. “If I’m doing a dive, I want to do it properly,” he told her. “That was what made him successful in business,” she says. “You have a clear goal, and you go for it. But he wasn’t an adrenaline-seeker. If I’d have suggested going bungee jumping, it would have been, ‘No way!’ He wouldn’t do like [Jeff] Bezos did, and go up in a rocket, because you need to be physically fit, to train. He wouldn’t have done that. On paper, this dive looked comfortable. You just sit there, right? He didn’t have to be physically fit. It was possible, convenient. We always were the glampers of the explorers.” The world was slow to emerge from Covid restrictions, so Dawood added the trip to the family bucket list and for the next two years, she didn’t follow the progress of the OceanGate expeditions. Life became busy again with work and school. They went on a Mediterranean cruise with her in-laws from Pakistan after having not seen them for so long. In September 2022, Suleman started a new chapter of his life, studying business at the University of Strathclyde. Dreams of exploring the deep ocean had been forgotten until late 2022, when Quintessentially called to ask if they were still interested in visiting the Titanic. “It was a shitload of money,” admits Dawood – “$500,000 for two seats! The kind of money I’d expect a house for.” She laughs slightly, shaking her head at the cost now. But the family could afford it – Shahzada was from one of Pakistan’s wealthiest families – and began planning to join OceanGate’s 2023 expedition. “Whatever due diligence I did,” she tells me, “I didn’t find a single civilian submersible accident. That was good enough for me. I hardly knew OceanGate, so my trust was based in Quintessentially.” In a statement, Quintessentially said that the services they provide to members are confidential, but clarified that they never had a commercial relationship with OceanGate, promoted any of their expeditions or recommended them to members. They said that they “will continue to be supportive to the Dawood family”. In February 2023, Rush and his wife Wendy, OceanGate’s director of communications, flew from Seattle to London to meet the Dawoods. In a cafe on the South Bank, Rush set about reassuring them that the trip would be worth every cent. He boasted about how unique the Titan was. No other submersible could take as many as five people to the deep ocean, he told them. He’d already made dreams come true by taking it to the Titanic 13 times. He described the strange ocean creatures and the flashes of blue, green and eerie white bioluminescence they would see floating past the large viewing port – “the largest on planet Earth”, as he liked to call it – and, finally, how they would arrive at the wreck itself. They’d glide towards the iconic bow encrusted with rusticles, the micro-organisms slowly eating through the great ship’s skeleton. “We had never even been snorkelling,” says Dawood. “And Shahzada got so wrapped up in Rush’s stories. But Wendy was very quiet. Then the conversation went to communication between the sub and the ship. And Stockton says, ‘Yeah, sometimes we lose contact.’ I noticed Wendy’s whole body go rigid. ‘We don’t like it when that happens,’ she said to him. ‘If you don’t tell us where you are, we worry.’ I felt the dynamic between them; she couldn’t get through to him. I think she saw the risks; she saw the potential that there was something not quite right. He just ignored her.” There was a lot that Rush had simply ignored – things that Dawood would only find out after the tragedy. He had failed to tell them about the many aborted dives and hundreds of technical issues that had plagued the Titan during its two short seasons in the North Atlantic. Or that in July 2022, while ascending, passengers had heard an explosive noise that shook the submersible, which Rush had never investigated. Or that the sub was operating under the radar, that he had refused to have it inspected or classified by any maritime authority, claiming that the safety process was too slow and “stifled innovation”. The Titan was not, in fact, registered to carry passengers at all. As the couples shook hands, the Rushes neglected to mention that for the past six months, the Titan had been sitting in a car park in St John’s, uncovered and unwatched, exposed to the icy conditions of the Newfoundland winter. * * * On 14 June, the family set off with a mixture of nervous excitement. “We’d all been so busy,” Dawood remembers. “And this was the start of a family adventure, that’s how we saw it.” They missed their connecting flight to St John’s, so by the time they arrived they had to jump straight aboard the Polar Prince, a ship that would take them 400 miles south-east across the North Atlantic to Titanic waters. Unbeknown to Dawood, funds were running low and the Polar Prince was all Rush could afford. An old ice breaker, the ship was not originally designed to carry passengers and its spoon-shaped hull pitched and rolled continually. In 2021 and 2022, OceanGate had hired a modern ship, the Horizon Arctic, which had transported the Titan on deck. It was impossible to carry the sub onboard the Polar Prince, so it was towed behind on a platform, buffeted and pounded by the waves. “This was the roughest we’d ever travelled,” Dawood admits. “I’m almost 50 and you put me in a bunk bed with scratchy bed sheets! Cruise ships have very nice stabilisers, and you pay $500,000 for this?” But she laughs and tells me how they joked about it. That month, Newfoundland had been enjoying unusually warm weather. A sea fog rolled gently along the rocky coast and a few icebergs lingered to the north. The capelin had arrived near the shore in their millions and there had been excited sightings of more than 300 humpback whales as the huge mammals feasted on the tiny fish. But out in the Atlantic, where the Polar Prince was headed, a heavy fog persisted; since the start of their 2023 expedition, OceanGate had not yet managed a single dive below 10 metres. “We didn’t have much time to think or to get too apprehensive,” Dawood says. “We were on the ship two days getting out there and by that time I was so seasick. So when the crew said the weather had come good [and that] the dive was on, my plan was to see them off then try to sleep until they came up.” Shahzada and Suleman wore jumpsuits, the kind you see astronauts in, bearing their names and the OceanGate logo. They were joined by Rush, who was piloting, a British businessman called Hamish Harding and French diver Paul-Henri Nargeolet, dubbed “Mr Titanic” as the world’s leading authority on the wreck. He had already seen the ship 37 times, five times onboard the Titan, and acted as the expert guide for OceanGate. “It was one of those occasions where you go into dark humour,” Dawood remembers. “We were talking about crashes. I remember Hamish saying how he’d never travel on a helicopter – he thought they were too dangerous. Suleman had his Rubik’s Cube, because he was planning to get the record for solving it at the deepest depth ever. And we were giggling, because Shahzada is clumsy and when he was going down the stairs he was wobbling a bit. I waved. And that was it. They got into a dinghy and sped off. It went very fast, the goodbye.” Dawood watched as her husband and son were transported to the Titan, floating about 100 metres away on its launch and recovery platform. The two divers stationed there hauled the men on to the precarious structure and guided them into the sub one by one. “Have a great dive,” one said to Suleman as he helped him inside. The hatch was bolted shut, and the flotation tanks at each corner of the platform were flooded with water. The Titan sank beneath the waves, detached from its platform and started its freefall. It would take about three hours to reach the wreck, 2.5 miles down on the ocean floor. * * * At around 11am, Dawood was in the dining area, longing for a sea sickness cure, when the first blow landed. “They’ve lost communications,” she heard someone say. Then they noticed her. “Don’t worry, it’s not unusual,” she was told. “In that moment, what am I supposed to do?” she says now. “I felt trapped on that ship and I had no choice but to trust what they told me.” The OceanGate crew seemed unfazed. They had been through this before and all would be well. The sub would still return by 3pm. It’s unbearable to imagine how long the next hours must have felt. The constant scanning of the horizon for a sighting of the submersible, the white tops mistaken for the tail of the Titan bobbing up from under the ocean. In the communications room where Wendy Rush was stationed, the tracking screen remained blank, and the text console silent. At 6.30pm, there was still no sign of the Titan; Kyle Bingham, OceanGate’s mission director, called a briefing and declared that the Titan was now officially missing. Dawood struggles to describe what it was like hearing those words. “It’s like an avalanche,” she tells me. “You see it coming. This is it, I’m going to be hit. But you’re on a cliff, so where can you go? I had to make a conscious choice. I knew I couldn’t let the emotions come. So, I grew wings, I flew away in my mind. That’s how I saved myself from the avalanche. “I told myself they were stuck,” she says. “But I was worried. Suleman is not … well, both my men, they’re not very good at being in the dark, and I knew it would be a very different darkness down there. Nothing. You literally can’t see a thing.” She recalls that the OceanGate doctor gave her something for sea sickness and asked one of the other tourists, who had been hoping to be on the next dive, to “keep an eye on her”. She remembers wandering around the ship, desperate for news but scared of what she might overhear. “There were lots of hushed voices,” she tells me. “They stopped when I was near, but I overheard them saying their water could run out and maybe they’d drink the condensation on the sub walls through straws … I didn’t need those things in my head, so I tried not to listen. I deleted all news from my phone. I wasn’t even really aware of the oxygen countdown. All I’d been told by the crew was that they could last four days down there, no more.” As the search and rescue operation kicked into gear, the skies above the Polar Prince were split by the trails of planes sent by the US and Canadian Coast Guards. Back in St John’s, the media gathered at the harbour, press conferences were held, theories discussed and rumours spread about a toxic culture at OceanGate, that Stockton Rush had ignored countless warnings about his operation, that he had dismissed safety as a waste of time. The truth was starting to come out. But, 400 miles out at sea, Dawood was solely dependent on the company briefings. “The energy on the ship was complete denial,” she says. “The crew were [acting] like nothing was happening.” Bingham continued to predict there had been a technical issue, but Rush and Nargeolet were expert enough to bring the sub back to the surface. He talked about banging that had been heard. “Regular and significant,” he reassured everyone. They were trying to locate where it was coming from, whether the men were sending an SOS from inside the Titan. “It’s just taking time,” he told them. “It did cross my mind that OceanGate had ulterior motivations about what they told us,” admits Dawood. “They were just trying to avoid the truth. But I would have deteriorated a lot quicker without hope.” A schedule was released to pass the time for the onboard crew. Jamming sessions were arranged, movies chosen and a nightly poker game organised. “Ultimately, I think they wanted to distract people, keep everyone occupied,” Dawood believes. “They wanted everyone onside, not to feed anything to the press. But jamming sessions? Am I really going to sit there and sing Kumbaya? I did try to give a movie a go, but when I got there it felt like an act of betrayal. Watching Wayne’s World while they are trapped in the dark did not sit well with me.” As I try to imagine the surreal scene she has just described, out of the corner of my eye I am aware of a purple plate with a small handprint and Suleman’s name painted underneath displayed on the sideboard. I realise that for the first time today Dawood has the beginnings of tears in her eyes. * * * On 22 June, the Horizon Arctic arrived at the scene carrying a remotely operated vehicle capable of diving to the Titanic depth. It was deployed immediately and 90 minutes later reached the bottom. Casting its robotic gaze across the seabed, it transmitted footage to the operators above and to the US Coast Guard, which was now in command. As the vehicle was guided this way and that, they spotted something at the edge of the frame. The twisted remnants of the Titan’s tail cone hove into view. “Every indication at this point is that a catastrophic event has occurred with the Titan,” were the carefully chosen words of the US Coast Guard officer on a call to the Polar Prince. Wendy Rush and OceanGate were forced to face the truth that some of them had suspected from the start. The Titan’s hull had failed almost three hours into the dive. Under the immense pressures of the deep ocean it had imploded, collapsing inward in a fraction of a second. The five men died instantaneously. “My first thought was, thank God,” admits Dawood. “When they said catastrophic, I knew Shahzada and Suleman didn’t even know about it. One moment they were there and the next they weren’t. Knowing they didn’t suffer has been so important. They’re gone, but the way they went does somehow make it easier.” And that is when Dawood found herself in what she calls “the after”. “In some ways, I was terrified to leave that weird bubble,” she says. The dregs of hope she had clung to in the middle of the ocean were gone and she had to face the practical business of getting home. “What was I going to do with their stuff? Their bags? Shahzada’s clothes and things were in my cabin, so I packed his bags. But I didn’t pack Suleman’s. I couldn’t. Someone else did that.” Before disembarking at St John’s, she was advised to disguise herself and was successfully shielded from the cameras. Shahzada’s family had flown from Pakistan to take her back to London. She carried Suleman’s backpack on to the plane and remembers how important that became to her mother-in-law. “She just wanted to hug the backpack,” Dawood recalls. “She held on to it all the way and kept apologising, saying I could take the bag back. But I said, ‘No, you can keep it. You lost them, too.’” Over the next 18 months, the US Coast Guard carried out a forensic investigation into Stockton Rush and OceanGate. The fatal flaws that had been lying in wait came to light, along with the many warnings that Rush had blatantly ignored. Dawood was advised it would be too much for her to attend the public hearings, and to this day she continues to protect herself – she is very cautious about how many of the revelations she needs to learn about. The official report into the tragedy concluded it was preventable and caused by inadequate engineering and testing, as well as Rush’s reckless approach. If he had survived, he would have faced criminal proceedings. Tighter regulations of passenger submersibles have been recommended, but it is all far too late for Dawood and her family. “From the beginning, I had a lot of reasons to hate Stockton, but does that really help me?” Dawood says. “He died with them. If I’m angry with him, I’m giving him power, and I refuse to do that. I’m sure people will say I’m naive, but if I start to analyse every single thing, where does that lead me? So, I choose my own … not happiness but … I choose me, every day. If I don’t, I wouldn’t be here. I would have killed myself, for sure.” Dawood pauses, then continues in a whisper. “It’s very hard. Being strong doesn’t mean you’re not feeling it.” She tells me that there have been days when panic attacks have completely paralysed her. When the lights have felt too bright and any sound at all too loud. Everything became a challenge. She tells me that even after many hours of intense therapy, Suleman’s room remains how he left it, her husband’s study untouched. “I have learned to give the grief attention,” she sighs. “So I go into Suleman’s room. Sometimes I find the cat sleeping on his pillow and I sit on the bed and let the grief come. And after a while I can put the grief away until the next time it gets too much. I’ve worked a lot on my grief for Suleman, but I’m only now starting to grieve for my husband. Publicly they are always put together, but they are two different relationships. Two very different pains. “We didn’t get the bodies for nine months,” she adds. “Well, when I say bodies, I mean the slush that was left. They came in two small boxes, like shoeboxes.” The slush, as she calls it, are the remains that were recovered from the sea bed and meticulously separated and DNA tested by the US Coast Guard. “There wasn’t much they could find,” she says. “They have a big pile they can’t separate, all mixed DNA, and they asked if I wanted some of that, too. But I said no, just what you know is Suleman and Shahzada.” After a while, Dawood takes me out into the garden. The dog follows us. It’s the first day the sun has made an appearance after weeks of rain, and the cat has found its way into a fragile square of sunlight on one of the raised beds. The dog sits good-naturedly but heavily on my foot and Dawood encourages him back to her side. “In a way, the dog reminds me of Suleman sometimes,” she says. “Because he is clumsy, spatially not aware. He doesn’t know his own strength and Suleman was sometimes awkward, didn’t quite know what to do with his physical strength. He was 19, just becoming a man.” Recently, Dawood walked from Hampton Court to her son’s university in Glasgow. The journey took five weeks and had been something Suleman had often said he’d like to do. She walked in tribute to him. She tells me also about her advanced plans to set up a grief and trauma centre, and hearing her excitement I can see how important these are for her own healing. “It’s the normal questions that people ask that are still the most difficult,” she says, stroking the dog’s neck. “Like, ‘Do you have children?’ That is the most dreaded question. I knew it would come, but it constantly takes me off guard. What do I say? I have two children but … if I say that, then they ask, ‘What does your older one do?’ So now I avoid saying children. I just say I have a daughter. I’m not lying, but it’s what I choose to say.” We sit very quietly for a minute or two. It’s not easy finding a way to end the time we’ve spent discussing this unimaginable grief. But then Dawood turns her attention to the garden. “I’m waiting for the tulips now,” she says. “I have hundreds of them, and more come up every spring.” As I look closely, I notice the many clumps of wide green leaves hiding the beginnings of the flowers to come. • Ninety-Six Hours by Christine Dawood is published by Whitefox on 12 May. To support the Guardian, order your copy from guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Writing from his cell in the Rajai Shahr prison in the northern Iranian city of Karaj, Babak Alipour wanted to tell his friends about those who had already gone to their execution. There was Behrouz Ehsani, 69, the elder statesman of the group, who was “never angry” about their predicament. Then there was Mehdi Hassani, a 48-year-old father of three who he saw a couple of times in the prison hospital and who would ask him to pass on to the children the message that he was “fine”. Despite the killings, Alipour, a 34-year-old law graduate with a passion for mountaineering who had been on death row for three years, recorded in his neat, tight, handwriting that he was not intimidated. On 12 March he made a short video on a phone smuggled into his jail. “Dictators have come, been overthrown, died, and been killed, and now it is the turn of Khamenei-the-son’s dictatorship,” Alipour said of the accession of Mojtaba Khamenei to supreme leader after the death of Ali Khamenei in airstrikes by the US and Israel. By this time, Alipour’s brother Roozbeh, his sister Maryam, and mother Ommolbanin Dehghan had been arrested as they returned home from a vigil outside the prison in which he was being held. Just under two weeks later, on 31 March, Alipour was taken to the gallows at Ghezel Hesar prison, a short drive west of where he had been held, where he was hanged with another cellmate, Pouya Ghobadi, a 32-year-old electrical engineer. Alipour and Ghobadi were accused, as Hassani and Ehsani had been, of being part of an armed rebellion and member of the opposition group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI or MeK). Alipour’s father, a farmer, whose former clothes business had been crushed by the stagnant Iranian economy, has not been able to recover his son’s remains. Alipour’s brother has not been heard of for a month, according to sources close to the family. In the last month, 16 men – eight political prisoners and eight protesters – have been hanged in Iran. There was a brief hiatus in the state killings when Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu’s war began on 28 February but something changed after 18 March. The youngest to die so far has been 18-year-old Amirhossein Hatami, who was hanged on 2 April after giving what was said to have been a forced confession to the charges of moharebeh (enmity against god) and efsad-fil-arz (corruption on earth) in relation to alleged involvement in an attack a Revolutionary Guard Corps base in Tehran during the January protests. The most recent hanging was of Amirali Mirjafari, 24, a student and computer technician who was killed on Tuesday for alleged involvement in the protests. A further 11 political prisoners remain on death row, ranging in age from 23 to 68, according to human rights activists. Reza Younesi, 45, is a professor in the chemistry department of Uppsala university in Sweden, where he has lived for two decades. His brother, Ali, 26, a prize-winning astronomy student, was arrested in Iran six years ago and his father, Yousef, 73, was taken from his home three years ago. Both men are serving custodial sentences for alleged links to the MeK. There was a worrying development a few weeks ago when Younesi’s father disappeared within the prison system and stopped making his calls back home. “We had no idea for exactly nine days but yesterday he called my mum and he has been transferred to the same prison where my brother is now,” Younesi said. For Younesi, it is the uncertainty as to how the regime will react as the war continues that is the most pressing concern. “This is like a horrible, brutal regime that we are talking about,” he said. “When there is a war, of course, they become even more brutal. So they can do more or less anything to prisoners, as they know that the international society, international human rights organisation, they cannot do much, and even if they say anything, no one pays attention.” The executions are said to be just another way to keep the people cowed at a moment of peril. “The US is not going to send any troops on the ground because of bad experience in Iraq so it’s not a big threat to the regime,” Younesi said. “If some of the top leaders are killed, the system is still alive and will not collapse. So the threat for them is people inside the country. They are using this penalty and executions as a tool to spread fear in society.” Mahmood Amiry-Moghaddam, the director of Iran Human Rights, a Norway-based rights group, said the numbers of political prisoners being executed in the last month was unprecedented. “Normally, most of the those who are executed are for criminal charges: drugs, murder, mainly,” he said. “The aim of these executions is to create fear among people. The political cost of execution of a protester or political prisoner is much higher in normal times. However, now, everything is overshadowed by the war.” On Thursday, Donald Trump claimed that he had persuaded Tehran not to carry out the execution of eight women. The Iranians have denied the White House claim that the women were due to die. The US president has – as yet – made no public comment about the men who have lost their lives. In a final video secretly filmed in jail, Alipour, who was from Amol, a city 75 miles north-east of Tehran, and dreamed of a democratic, secular Iran, echoed the warning about the regime’s plans under the cover of war. “In the whirlpool of crises that engulf his entire government, Khamenei wants to display the height of his brutality and repression by increasing the number of executions in order to create fear and terror in the explosive Iranian society in order to save himself from overthrow, but he has read blindly,” the condemned man said. “Without a doubt, the day of freedom and happiness for the heroic people of the blasphemous mullahs will come soon.”