by Donato Paolo Mancini and Flavia Rotondi
Italian divers have retrieved four bodies from a sunken yacht off Sicily, where British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer were among those feared to have died earlier this week.
While four people were recovered, the local coast guard said Wednesday, no statements identifying them have been issued. A fifth body was spotted in the yacht but hasn’t yet been retrieved, an Italian government official said.
A total of six people likely were trapped and died inside the Bayesian when it was hit by a tornado near Porticello, Sicily, on Monday, according to authorities. The coast guard said operations would resume on Thursday morning to retrieve the remaining two missing people. Adding to the complexity of the search mission is the “narrowness of the spaces” inside the sunken yacht and “the presence of many objects,” the agency said.
Authorities are meanwhile investigating exactly how the luxury yacht sank — and why it sank so quickly — in the early hours of Monday morning, with the captain and other survivors answering questions from the local prosecutor’s office, according to a report from Italian news agency ANSA.
The UK’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch said it’s also probing the incident, with questions surfacing around the expansiveness of the yacht’s mast and the state of the hull.
“Right now there is no evidence that the mast has been snapped,” coast guard spokesman Vincenzo Zagarola told Bloomberg News on Wednesday. “We can also say that, so far, there is no evidence that the hull has been broken. But we don’t have a clear idea yet of the full damage.”
Crews aided by military ships, remote-controlled underwater vehicles, and helicopters have been searching for missing passengers since Monday. Six guests, including Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares, and nine crew have been rescued. The body of Recaldo Thomas, the ship’s chef, was found soon after the Bayesian sank.
Lynch and his daughter Hannah, Bloomer and his wife Judy, and Clifford Chance partner Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda were identified as the missing passengers on Tuesday by authorities in Sicily.
Lynch, 59, and his family were celebrating his recent acquittal from fraud charges with a small group of advisers when the violent storm struck. The charges stemmed from Lynch’s sale of his software firm Autonomy Corp. to Hewlett Packard Co. in 2011. The Silicon Valley giant went on to accuse Lynch of accounting failures. He’d spent years working to clear his name in court and restore his reputation as one of Europe’s most successful entrepreneurs.
A little over two months before the yacht accident, a San Francisco jury found Lynch not guilty of criminal charges that he duped HP into overpaying for his company. He was still fighting HP in a civil case in London, where a British judge held him responsible for creating the illusion of a company much larger and more successful than it really was.
Rescue workers have had difficulties gaining access to the yacht 48 meters below the surface, citing the depth and position of the vessel’s hull.
“The search will go on as long as necessary,” Zagarola told Bloomberg. “For sure the whole hull will need to be inspected meter by meter.
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