April 21, 2008	Monday	Rabi-us-Sani 14, 1429

LONDON: One of the last tickets for the Titanic’s doomed maiden voyage and a pocket watch which stopped when it sank have been sold by a relative of a survivor, a British auctioneer said on Sunday.

The ticket sold for 33,000 pounds ($66,000), while the pocket watch fetched 31,000 pounds at a sale on Saturday at auction house Henry Aldridge and Son in Devizes, Wiltshire, south-west England.

The items had belonged to Lillian Asplund, who died aged 99 in 2006. She kept them in a shoebox at her home in the United States until her death, when they were left to a second cousin who sold them. Asplund was five years old when she, her parents and four brothers boarded the ship in 1912 to emigrate from Sweden to the US.

She, her mother and one of her brothers survived when they were thrown into a lifeboat, but her father and three other brothers drowned. More than 1,500 people died when the Titanic hit an iceberg on its way from Southampton, southern England to New York.—AFP