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Five bodies have been recovered by divers searching the wreckage of Mike Lynch’s superyacht Bayesian, which sank off the coast of Sicily, according to an Italian official.
Four bodies have been pulled from the sunken yacht and one more is still being removed from the wreckage, Salvatore Cocina, head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, told the Financial Times.
Lynch, one of the UK’s best-known tech entrepreneurs, is among six missing passengers after Bayesian went down in an intense storm on Monday. His 18-year-old daughter and Jonathan Bloomer, chair of insurance group Hiscox and Morgan Stanley International, are also missing.
Divers, assisted by an underwater drone, managed to gain access to part of the sunken yacht earlier on Wednesday after two days of struggling to reach its cabins.
The trip on the Lynch family’s 56-metre superyacht had been intended to celebrate the Autonomy founder’s recent acquittal by a US jury, after a 12-year legal battle over the software group’s $11bn sale to Hewlett-Packard.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 people rescued in the early hours of Monday morning.
Italian prosecutors are investigating how the yacht sank in just a matter of minutes, leaving one crew member dead.
“Everything happened extremely fast,” Vincenzo Zagarola, a coastguard official, told the FT, as Italian divers continued their attempts to enter the wreck on the seabed on Wednesday.
He also said the wind that hit the British-registered yacht reached 60 knots (more than 110km/h), which is characterised as a Force 11 or a “violent storm” on the Beaufort scale.
The speed of the sinking of the 540-tonne yacht remains the biggest mystery about the accident, given that it would normally take much longer for such a large, modern vessel to founder even if it was laid flat on its side by the wind or completely overturned.
So rapid was the sinking that the crew did not appear to have time to send a Mayday distress signal. The first sign of the emergency was the firing of a red flare from the life raft that was seen by the coastguard and a skipper of a boat anchored nearby, who rescued the 15 survivors.
By the time the coastguard reached the location of the flare, the yacht had completely sunk.
Charlotte Golunski, a partner at Invoke Capital, founded by Lynch, described to medical staff how she remembered being asleep in her cabin and suddenly waking up in the water with her small daughter Sophia, according to Domenico Cipolla, director of the emergency unit at Palermo’s Di Cristina paediatric hospital.
When the 36-year-old mother lost grip of her toddler’s hand, she said it was like “looking death in the eye”, according to Cipolla. Golunski went on to say how it all happened in one or two minutes.
The family were discharged from hospital and together with the other survivors are now receiving counselling at a hotel in Santa Flavia.
Fabio Genco, head of Palermo Emergency Medical Services, told the FT: “The little girl’s dad and other people said that some objects dropped on their heads during the sinking of the boat. The dad said that everything lasted three to five minutes. Survivors talked about being in the dark in the middle of the sea.”
In the nearby town of Termini Imerese the public prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into the accident, in collaboration with the coastguard of Porticello, “to establish the exact dynamic of the shipwreck”, the coastguard has announced.
Search operations for the six missing people also continued at Porto Bagnera, the picturesque fishing harbour of Porticello, near where the luxury yacht sank in the early hours of Monday, just 400 metres off the shore.
Perini Navi, the Viareggio-based shipyard that built Bayesian in 2008, was absorbed in 2022 by the listed Italian Sea Group, which declined a request for comment when contacted by the FT.
Additional reporting by Victor Mallet in London
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