Divers searched Tuesday for the wreck of a luxury yacht off the coast of Sicily that may have carried six missing people, including British technology entrepreneur Mike Lynch and a Morgan Stanley executive, after it sank during a fierce storm on Monday.
The British-flagged 56-metre-long (184ft) superyacht Bayesian, carrying 22 people, was anchored near the Porticello harbour when it was hit by a severe pre-dawn storm.
Fifteen people survived before the boat capsized and one man’s body was recovered immediately. Six passengers were thus missing – Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and their two wives.
“The fear is that the bodies are trapped inside the ship,” Salvatore Cocina, head of civil protection in Sicily, told Reuters, adding that the ship lay at a depth of 49 metres (160 feet). That meant the time divers could spend beneath the waves was a limiting factor.
“The biggest difficulty we have is the depth, which does not allow for prolonged intervention,” fire department diver Marco Tilotta told reporters. “Our plan is to search centimetre by centimetre.”
Tilotta said the ship appeared to be intact and was lying on its right side. Divers had not yet determined whether the 72-meter-tall mast had broken.
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Lynch, 59, is one of Britain’s best-known tech entrepreneurs. He built the country’s biggest software firm Autonomy from his groundbreaking research at Cambridge University and became known as Britain’s Bill Gates.
He sold the firm to HP for $11 billion in 2011, after which the deal suddenly fell apart and the US tech giant accused him of fraud, resulting in a lengthy trial. Lynch was eventually acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June.
Morvillo represented Lynch in the case, while Bloomer appeared as a character witness on his behalf.
In an extraordinary coincidence, Mike Lynch’s co-defendant in the trial, Stephen Chamberlain, died in a road accident in Britain over the weekend, his lawyer said on Monday.
The Bayesian was owned by Lynch’s wife, who survived the accident, and other guests on the yacht included Lynch’s co-workers. The only body recovered so far is that of the ship’s chef, Ricardo Thomas, an Antiguan citizen.
The British government’s Marine Accident Investigation Branch said it had sent four inspectors to Sicily to carry out an “initial assessment”.
Didn’t think it would happen
An expert at the accident site, who asked not to be named, said the initial focus of the official investigation would be whether the ferry’s crew had closed the entry gates to the ship before the storm hit.
Investigators will look at whether appropriate precautions were taken given the forecast of bad weather that night.
“We didn’t see it coming,” the boat’s captain, James Catfield, said of the storm on Monday, according to La Repubblica news website.
Storms and heavy rain have lashed Italy in recent days, while weeks of intense heat have seen sea temperatures reach record lows, increasing the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts say.
“The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), about 3 degrees above normal,” meteorologist Luca Mercali said.
“We cannot say that this is all due to global warming, but we can say that its effect is increasing,” he told Reuters.
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