Police divers resumed their search on Tuesday for six people believed to be trapped in the hull of a A superyacht that sank in the open sea off the coast of Sicily, including a British tech tycoon who was celebrating his recent acquittal for fraud with the people who had defended him at trial.
Civil protection officials said they believed the Bayesian, a 56-metre British-flagged yacht, was struck by a tornado over water. The ship was moored about half a mile off Porticello, near Palermo, when a storm blew up and the vessel sank around 5 a.m. local time on Monday.
Grainy footage taken by closed-circuit cameras from the shore, posted on the Giornale di Sicilia website, showed the Bayesian’s majestic 246-foot illuminated mast weathering the storm and then disappearing within a minute.
Fifteen of the 22 people on board survived, including a mother who said she carried her one-year-old baby over the waves to save him. One body was found, identified by authorities as that of the ship’s chief cook, who was born in Antigua. The rest of the 10 crew members survived, including the captain, whom prosecutors reportedly sought to question.
Fabio La Bianca/Baia Santa Nicolicchia via AP
“This is a great, great tragedy,” said British Ambassador to Italy Edward Llewellyn, who visited Porticello on Tuesday. Britain has sent four investigators to the scene, as the disaster involved a British-flagged ship and British citizens were among the missing.
Firefighters said the other six passengers will be considered missing until they are located in the wreckage. Tycoon Mike Lynchwho was once hailed as Britain’s tech king and was cleared in June of fraud and conspiracy charges in a U.S. federal trial related to Hewlett Packard’s $11 billion acquisition of his company, Autonomy Corp.
Also missing are Christopher Morvillo, one of Lynch’s lawyers, and Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International and former head of Autonomy’s audit committee, who testified in Lynch’s defense.
The wreck of the luxury ship is approximately 164 feet underwater — much deeper than most recreational divers are certified for and requiring special precautions. Recovery teams could stay for only 12 minutes, a measure that slowed their efforts to reach the wreck’s cramped interior.
Italian Coast Guard / AP
Karsten Borner, captain of the Sir Robert Baden Powell, who rescued the 15 survivors who managed to get into a lifeboat, said he was close enough to see the Bayesian when the storm hit.
“A moment later, she was gone,” he said. “They said they flattened themselves on the water and sank within two minutes,” Borner added, quoting survivors.
The search teams, each made up of two cave divers, worked Tuesday to open access points to get inside the wreck. They used a remotely operated underwater vehicle, or ROV, to help with the search.
Divers were unable to access cabins below deck because they were blocked by furniture that had shifted during the violent storm. Rescue teams said they assumed the six missing people were in those cabins because the storm hit while most people were asleep, but teams did not check for them through portholes.
Luca Cari, a spokesman for the rescue teams, said the search was proceeding much more slowly than that of another major shipwreck in Italy, the 2012 Costa Concordia cruise ship that capsized on its side off the coast of Tuscany, because of the depth of the wreck and the limited space for divers to maneuver.
“It was much simpler. Here, everything is tighter,” he says.
The outing was intended at least in part to celebrate Lynch’s acquittal and “anticipate what was to come,” said Reid Weingarten, a Washington lawyer and member of Lynch’s defense team who was not on the yacht.
“A lot of people went, a lot of people planned to go and then of course it happened,” Weingarten said.
Some of the people who supported Lynch throughout the ordeal were on board, including Morvillo, the attorney Weingarten worked with and called a “brother.”
Morvillo’s wife, Neda, is also missing, according to his law firm Clifford Chance.
Aki Hussain, chief executive of international insurer Hiscox Group, of which Bloomer, the witness, was chairman, said the company was “deeply shocked and saddened by this tragic event”.
“Our thoughts are with all those affected, especially our Chairman, Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife Judy, who are among those lost, and their families who await further updates on this terrible situation,” he added.
Among the survivors, the Emslie family was released Tuesday from the children’s hospital in Palermo where little Sofia had been kept overnight after her rescue. Her mother, Charlotte Golunski, said she momentarily lost her grip on her 1-year-old daughter in the water but then managed to keep her above the waves until a lifeboat inflated and they were both saved, doctors said.
Michael Liedtke / AP
The father, identified by the ANSA news agency as James Emslie, also survived.
“They don’t talk much, mainly because they consider themselves survivors and don’t understand why they survived given what they’ve been through,” said Dr. Domenico Cipolla, head of the emergency department at Di Cristina Pediatric Hospital.
Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Cipolla said Golunski reported that she and the baby were sleeping in the cabin and suddenly found themselves in the water, where they also found Emslie who was in another part of the ship. Cipolla said the parents have been in contact with other survivors, who are staying at a nearby hotel and awaiting the arrival of other family members in Sicily.
The baby slept well during the night and all were released after final checks on Tuesday morning, he said in a videotaped interview published on Palermo Today, adding that psychologists had been made available.
Other survivors include Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares. Hannah Lynch, believed to be the couple’s 18-year-old daughter, is among the missing.
The yacht’s registered owner is Revtom Ltd., according to the online maritime database Equasis. Bacares is listed as Revtom’s sole owner, according to the Isle of Man company’s registration documents.
Salvatore Cavalli / AP
Its name, Bayesian, could be a reference to “Bayesian inference,” one of the two main approaches to statistical machine learning and the one used by Lynch’s company.
The yacht, built in 2008 by Italian company Perini Navi, carried 12 passengers and 10 crew members. According to online charter companies, it was available for charter for about $215,000 per week and was distinguished by its massive aluminum mast, one of the tallest in the world.
The Coast Guard said there was no evidence of fuel leaking from the wreck so far.
In an unrelated incident, Lynch’s co-defendant in the Autonomy trial, who was also acquitted, Stephen Chamberlain, was killed Sunday when he was struck by a car while jogging in Cambridgeshire, England, Chamberlain’s attorney, Gary Lincenberg, said.
