The body of UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch was recovered Thursday from his sunken yacht off Sicily, as the search continued for the last of the six people missing.
Specialist divers were still looking for a missing woman, a coastguard official told AFP, with a source close to the investigation having earlier indicated Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter Hannah had yet to be found.
On Wednesday they pulled up four bodies from the wreck of the “Bayesian”, while another was brought to shore in Porticello, on the north of the Italian island near Palermo, Thursday morning.
The latest grim discovery brings the death toll to six, after the body of a man believed to be the yacht’s chef was found shortly after the ship went down in a storm before dawn on Monday.
The 56-metre (185 feet) British-flagged sailing boat had been anchored some 700 metres off Porticello, near Palermo on the north of the Italian island, when it was struck by a waterspout — akin to a mini-tornado.
It sank within minutes.
Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife, but the businessman and his daughter were among six people reported missing.
The passengers were guests of 59-year-old Lynch — a celebrated technology entrepreneur and investor sometimes referred to as the UK’s answer to Bill Gates — celebrating his recent acquittal in a massive US fraud case.
Lynch’s lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda, and Jonathan Bloomer, the chair of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy, were also among the missing.
Many questions remain about why the yacht sank, and on Thursday the head of the company which built the boat said the tragedy could have been avoided.
“Everything that was done reveals a very long summation of errors,” said Giovanni Costantino, head of the Italian Sea Group, which includes the Perini Navi company that built “Bayesian”.
He told Italy’s Corriere della Sera newspaper that bad weather was forecast and all the passengers should have been gathered at a pre-arranged assembly point, with all the doors and hatches closed.
Security camera footage of the ship from the shore showed the lights on its mast going out, which Costantino said indicated a short circuit, meaning that the ship had already taken on water.
“A Perini ship resisted Hurricane Katrina, a category 5 (hurricane). Does it seem to you that it can’t resist a tornado from here?” he told the newspaper.
Costantino said it was “good practice when the ship is at anchor to have a guard on the bridge, and if there was one he could not have failed to see the storm coming”.
“Instead it took on water with the guests still in the cabin… They ended up in a trap, those poor people ended up like mice in a trap,” he said.
It was reportedly owned by Lynch’s family.
Lynch was acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court in June after he was accused of an $11 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
A co-defendant, former Autonomy executive Stephen Chamberlain, died after being hit by a car on Saturday in England.
Italian authorities have opened a probe into the sinking, while the UK’s marine accident investigation branch sent four inspectors to Palermo.
AFP
