A friend of one of the victims of the Titan submersible said the CEO was playing 'Russian roulette' with passenger safety.

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush managed to convince British adventurer Hamish Harding, Shahzada Dawood and his son Suleman Dawood and Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet to pay £195,000 for a ticket to visit the Titanic wreckage.

However, the sub went missing after its support vessel lost contact with it for about an hour and 45 minutes.

On June 22, OceanGate Expeditions issued a statement saying that all five people aboard were believed to be dead, with experts saying the catastrophic implosion likely killed its pilot and four passengers instantly amid the intense water pressure in the deep North Atlantic.

Now, Victor Vescovo, one of the world’s most accomplished deep-sea pilots, who had completed a previous 2021 mission with Hamish Harding, begged his friend not to board the sub.

Vescovo told The Mirror: "I told him (Hamish) not to go anywhere near that submersible, that I thought it was only a matter of time before it catastrophically failed at depth.

"That anyone going down in it was playing Russian roulette with each dive adding a bullet to the chamber. I honestly said that to him. But he told me he thought it was safe enough."

"The Marine Technical Society, MTS, wrote a letter to Stockton Rush imploring him to get the sub classed or else stop his operations. He ignored their great collective experience and kept diving into an inherently flawed design and operation."

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It comes after a US federal investigation chief declared a transcript between the doomed submersible and its mother ship which detailed the craft’s descent towards the wreck of the Titanic was "made up."

The communications were released last summer and indicated that a series of alarms had transformed the dive into a harrowing ordeal.

However, the head of the US federal investigation team said the log was fabricated.

Captain Jason D. Neubauer told the New York Times: "I’m confident it’s a false transcript. It was made up. Somebody did it well enough to make it look plausible."

Vescovo added there was an increased risk of significant hull damage due to the fact the sub was towed to the dive site.

He added: "I mean, on their last trip to Titanic, they actually towed the submersible to the dive location on the open water.

"Who knows what kind of beating the sub took in the North Atlantic on the way there that increased the risk of significant hull damage."