Divers scoured the wreck of a luxury yacht off Sicily's coast on Tuesday to find six missing people, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and a Morgan Stanley executive, following an intense storm that sank the vessel on Monday.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-metre-long (184-ft) superyacht, was carrying 22 people and anchored off the port of Porticello when it was hit by the fierce, pre-dawn storm.
Fifteen people escaped before it capsized and the body of one person who died was swiftly recovered. That left six passengers unaccounted for - Lynchand 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 got trapped inside the vessel," which was lying 49 metres (160 feet) deep, Salvatore Cocina, head of civil protection in Sicily, told Reuters. This meant time beneath the waves was a limiting factor for the divers.
"The biggest difficulty we have is due to the depth, which does not allow long times of intervention," fire department diver Marco Tilotta told reporters. "We plan ... to search centimetre by centimetre."
Tilotta said the vessel appeared to be intact and was lying on its right side. Divers had not ascertained whether the 72-metre-long mast had snapped somewhere along its length.
TRIAL
Lynch, 59, is one of the UK's best-known tech entrepreneurs. He built the country's largest software firm, Autonomy, from his ground-breaking 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 spectacularly unravelled with the U.S. tech giant accusing 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 had appeared as a character witness on his behalf.
In an apparent extraordinary coincidence, Stephen Chamberlain, Mike Lynch's co-defendant in the trial, died after a road accident in Britain over the weekend, his lawyer said on Monday.
The Bayesian was owned by Lynch's wife, who survived the disaster, and other guests on the yacht included Lynch's colleagues. The only body so far retrieved was that of the onboard chef Ricardo Thomas, an Antiguan citizen.
The British government's Marine Accident Investigation Branch said it sent four of its inspectors to Sicily to conduct a "preliminary assessment."
DIDN'T SEE IT COMING
One expert at the scene of the disaster who declined to be named said an early focus of the official investigation would be whether the yacht's crew had closed access hatches into the vessel before the storm struck.
Investigators would look at whether appropriate measures had been taken, given the forecasts for bad weather overnight.
"We didn't see it coming," the captain of the yacht, James Catfield, said of the storm, according to la Repubblica news website on Monday.
Storms and heavy rains have ravaged Italy in recent days, after weeks of scorching heat warmed the sea temperature to record highs, raising the risk of extreme weather conditions, experts said.
"The sea surface temperature around Sicily was around 30 degrees Celsius (86 Fahrenheit), which is almost 3 degrees more than normal," said meteorologist Luca Mercalli.
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"We can't say that this is all due to global warming but we can say that it has an amplifying effect," he told Reuters.
