Five Men Trapped in Oil Pipeline Deep Under Sea-GREEDY Owners Left Them to Die

[Ladybbird]

Five Men Trapped in 30 Inch Oil Pipeline Deep Under The Sea, Air Running Out -Left to Die

Pipeline The harrowing story of the Paria pipeline disaster that shook Trinidad and Tobago to its core.

MailOnline 6 JUL 2025




On February 25 2022, five professional divers were working to repair a leaking section of oil pipeline off the coast of Trinidad and Tobago when something went terribly wrong.


Unbeknownst to them, there was a pressure differential between the inside of the pipe and the underwater room in which they were working.

When they removed a plug that was keeping the pipe sealed, the high pressure air that was being pumped into the room rushed to fill the void inside the pipe with such horrifying force that it pulled the men in with it, trapping them deep beneath the Caribbean sea.

They were sucked into the 30 inch wide pipe along with a rush of sea water, down 60ft down to where the pipe turned to run along the sea floor.

When they finally came to a stop along a 1,2000ft length of pipe, they managed to group together in a small air bubble. Lying on their backs in the pitch black, injured and covered in oil they strained their necks out of the liquid to breath.





Over the course of three grueling hours, one man, Christopher Boodram, 39, managed to drag himself out in search of help. And he had no choice but to leave his friends behind in the air pocket.



When he finally emerged from the end of the pipe, injured and exhausted, he told the crowd waiting above the waterline what had happened and begged them to rescue the others. THEY DIDN'T

But officials from the state-owned oil company Paria - which owns and operates the pipe - allegedly refused. They reportedly insisted that a rescue mission was too dangerous and they blocked volunteer divers from staging their own rescue attempts.

The other four men who had dived with Christopher that day - Fyzal Kurban, 57, Rishi Nagassar, 48, Kazim Ali Jr, 37, and Yusuf Henry, 31 - were left to die.

Yet three years on, not one person has been held accountable. Neither Christopher nor the families of those killed have received a penny in compensation.

And while the world was captivated by the rescue of 15 young footballers from a Thai cave in 2018 and horrified by the Titan submersible disaster of 2023, few outside the Caribbean have heard of the 'Paria Diving Tragedy'.

The Daily Mail set out to change this and to tell these men?s stories with our investigative podcast, Pipeline.

We found evidence of failing safety standards, lucrative contracts and secretive political relationships, and confronted some of Trinidad and Tobago's most powerful men including its then prime minister, Keith Rowley.

This week, Pipeline became the top series in US Apple Podcasts when we reached number one in their American charts and number two in Australia.

Today we are sharing some of the most shocking revelations that we uncovered in our bid to expose the truth of the scandalous tragedy that claimed four lives and scarred countless others.

The Autopsies

In the hours after Christopher escaped from the pipe, waiting volunteer divers tried to communicate with the men still trapped inside. They did so by tapping out emergency signals onto the pipes metal sides and waiting to hear if the men tapped back. They did.

In fact, the volunteers could still hear the men deep inside the pipe in the early hours of Saturday morning almost 12 hours after they were sucked in.


But despite this clear proof of life, and the agonies the men must have been experiencing in their hellish prison, Paria repeatedly blocked volunteer divers from staging a rescue.

They insisted it was too dangerous.


Two days later Paria announced their efforts would be focused instead on recovering the men?s bodies. On Monday 28 February 2021, they started flushing them out of the pipe.

The dead divers were so swollen and covered in oil that they were almost unrecognizable to the family members who went to the mortuary to identify them.

But most horrifying of all, their autopsies confirmed what the tapping signals had suggested - the men had not died quickly.

In fact, one of the men, Kazim Ali Jr, may have been alive for up to 39 hours in those unimaginable conditions: trapped and terrified in the dark, desperately hoping rescuers would arrive soon.


Fast forward and in December 2021, just three months before the accident, Christopher, the sole survivor of the Pipeline tragedy, and Rishi Nagassar who would perish in it were both involved in another incident.

They were working on a nearby gas line also owned and operated by Paria when it caught on fire, sending flames spewing across the platform.





The men were working in a small air-filled room, called a habitat, about 15ft below the surface at Berth 6, pictured. Forty years before the four men died, one of their fathers was killed while working on exactly the same stretch of pipe a few hundred meters away.





People began to turn on Christopher, accusing him of lying. They said there was no way he could have survived in the pipe. They accused him of being fame hungry, or of trying to cover something up.

The vitriol grew so intense that even Christopher started to think he was going crazy.

When he began his escape from the pipe, he had left the other men with the promise that he would come back with help. So when he was discharged after three days in intensive care and realized that his friends hadnt been rescued, it was agony.







I made promises that I eventually couldnt keep. And that is something that I cant let go of, he said, What gives me that right to live




PIPELINE OF DEATH







https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDjODRpuXrU