Pakistan is again in the limelight due to two of its citizens dying in the submersible accident while trying to reach the wreck of the Titanic thirteen thousand feet below the ocean surface. Earlier, more than two hundred Pakistanis are believed to have died while trying illegally to reach Europe when their trawler sank near Greece. But what is really shameful is that there was practically no mention of this tragedy in the international press, while huge resources were employed to rescue those five people in the submersible (Titan) which imploded while on its way down. Compare this with the fact that the Greek authorities did nothing to rescue the drowning Pakistanis, Syrians and others.
I knew the family of the two Pakistanis (father and son) who perished in the Titan accident. The father (Shehzada Dawood) was the son of Hussain Dawood, whom I knew when I was working in Dawood Petroleum. Hussain Dawood spoke flawless English, having graduated from Harvard. His half-brother Aziz was my boss, an illiterate lout who should have been strangled at birth. He once accused me of taking bribes from contractors. If I'd had a gun with me at the time, I'd have shot him immediately.
The Dawoods were once the richest family in Pakistan. I knew Ahmed Dawood, the founder of the dynasty. He had filed for bankruptcy thrice to get rich. His son Aziz was not different from him, he used my immediate boss (the late Yousuf Noor) to siphon money into his own bank accounts from the public limited company of which he was MD. Poor Yousuf Noor was severely punished for this, he had to flee Pakistan to avoid being arrested. He was given a job in Dubai by one of his friends, where he died in 2015 (without ever returning to Pakistan). A pity, because the man was a genius who could have become the petroleum minister (even though he was a Memon).
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