Five bodies found inside sunken yacht in Sicily, search for last missing person

Rome, Aug 21 (EFE).- Italian emergency teams managed to extract four bodies from inside a sunken yacht in Sicily (south) on Wednesday and locate a fifth, while they are busy searching for the last missing person and carrying out identification work.

During the afternoon, they managed to remove four bodies from the sailboat, transporting them in bags to the nearby port of Porticello, while the authorities assured EFE that they have managed to locate a fifth body inside the ship, which lies on the Sicilian seabed at a depth of 50 metres.

The British-flagged yacht ‘Bayesian’ sank on Monday night off the coast of Porticello in the midst of a strong storm, with 22 people aboard, 12 passengers and 10 crew members.

British IT magnate Mike Lynch was enjoying a holiday inside with some family and friends.

Of these, fifteen people managed to save their lives at sea, including Lynch’s own wife, Angela Bacares, while the death of the cook, Recaldo Thomas, a Canadian born on the island of Antigua, was soon confirmed.

Authorities confirmed that six people were missing: Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah; Morgan Stanley International bank president Jonathan Bloomer and his wife Judy; and the tycoon’s lawyer, Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda.

Recovery efforts were complicated by the depth at which the yacht was found and the position in which it found itself after its sudden sinking.

The Italian fire brigade divers managed to open an access route a day later, but they were slow, having only 12 minutes of autonomy for each dive. They therefore decided to reinforce the operation with an underwater robot.

These efforts have led to the discovery of five of the six missing persons in the yacht’s flooded rooms, among furniture and mattresses, on Wednesday, although only four bodies have been taken to land and subsequently to the morgue for identification.

The media reports that the bodies are those of businessman Lynch, his daughter, Bloomer and Morvillo, although the authorities prefer to remain silent for the moment and wait for the relatives, some of whom survived the tragedy, to identify them.

The provisional death toll from the sinking thus rises to six, while a sixth missing person is still being sought.

Meanwhile, the Termini-Imerese Public Prosecutor’s Office has opened an investigation to clarify the disaster and today questioned the captain of the sailboat, James Catfield, a 51-year-old New Zealander and one of the survivors, for more than two hours in a hotel in the area.

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