The bodies of British tech businessman Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah have been recovered, alongside Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda Morvillo, and Canadian-Antiguan national Recaldo Thomas, who was working as a chef on the yacht, Bayesian.
An investigation has been opened into the deaths of those seven people in the sinking. The chief prosecutor, Ambrogio Cartosio, said his office has opened an initial investigation into manslaughter and negligent shipwreck.
He told reporters at a press conference that they would try to determine whether the captain, crew, individuals in charge of supervision, the ship-builder or others could bear responsibility.
“We will establish each element’s responsibility, that will be done by the inquiry, so we can’t do that prematurely,” Cartosio said. “For me, it is probable that offences were committed, that it could be a case of manslaughter, but we can only establish that if you give us the time to investigate. Media timing is completely different from that of a prosecutor. We need a minimum amount of time to come to a proper scientific conclusion.”
Maritime director of western Sicily, Rear Admiral Raffaele Macauda, said the weather at the time of the incident was abnormal but that “there was nothing to suggest such an extreme situation would arise.” The weather event had been initially described as a waterspout but later more accurately labeled a downburst.
Girolamo Bentivoglio, chief of the Palermo fire service, said that specialized divers attempting to retrieve the bodies had to deal with “very little visibility due to the weather conditions” and were part of a 70-person search-and-rescue operation.
“The yacht obviously pinned to the right and obviously the [people] tried to go on the other side and then took refuge in their cabins,” Bentivoglio said. “We found four or five bodies in the cabin on the left and there was another one in the third cabin on the left too, and they were in the higher part of the wreck.”
.