OTTAWA: Mangled debris recovered from the small submersible that was destroyed when it imploded during a recent dive to the Titanic wreck was offloaded Wednesday in eastern Canada, bringing to an end a difficult search-and-recovery operation. 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 a ship onto a flatbed truck at a Canadian Coast Guard terminal in St. John's.

Pelagic Research, the New York company that owns the Odysseus remote-operated vehicle used in the search for the ill-fated submersible, said its offshore search-and-recovery operation has wrapped up. "We've finished our offshore (actions) and are basically demobilizing now and getting the team back to their loved ones and we're going to get our assets back to our operations base in New York," company spokesman Jeff Mahoney told AFP. He said the search and recovery had been "an extremely risky operation."

"It was extremely taxing and exhausting for the team who were working around the clock with almost no sleep this whole time, over 10 days of working. It was a very solemn process," he said. Canadian officials declined to comment on the recovery of the sub debris. Titan was reported missing on June 18 and the US Coast Guard said last Thursday that all five people aboard the submersible had died after the vessel suffered a catastrophic implosion.

A debris field was found on the seafloor, 1,600 feet (500 meters) from the bow of the Titanic, which sits more than two miles (nearly four kilometers) below the ocean's surface and 400 miles off the coast of Newfoundland. The announcement of the implosion ended a multinational search-and-rescue operation that captured the world's attention since the tourist craft went missing. The debris is now expected to be handed over to investigators as probes into the submersible tragedy begin in both Canada and the United States.