A body believed to be that of UK tech magnate Mike Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter has been located in the wreckage of a luxury yacht off the coast of Sicily, meaning all missing passengers have now been found.
The Italian Coastguard said the sixth and final missing person had been located on the sunken Bayesian on Friday.
Vincenzo Zagarola, of the Italian Coastguard, said the search for Hannah has not been “easy or quick”, comparing the sunken yacht to an “18-storey building full of water”.
Mr Lynch, his daughter Hannah, Morgan Stanley International bank chairman Jonathan Bloomer, his wife Judy Bloomer, Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda Morvillo died when the yacht sank at around 5am local time on Monday.
Italian emergency services had resumed their search on Friday for the body of Hannah, the only person still unaccounted for since Mr Lynch’s family yacht sank off Sicily this week.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56m (184ft) superyacht carrying 22 passengers and crew, was anchored off the port of Porticello, near Palermo, when it capsized and sank on Monday within minutes of being struck by a predawn storm.
A judicial investigation has been opened into the sinking, which has baffled naval marine experts, who say a boat like the Bayesian, built by Italian high-end yacht manufacturer Perini, should have withstood the storm.
The CEO of The Italian Sea Group, which owns Perini, told Reuters the shipwreck was the result of a string of “indescribable, unreasonable errors” made by the crew, and ruled out any design or construction failings.
Pulling the wreck out of the sea, where it is now lying on its right side, apparently intact, at a depth of about 50m may help investigators determine what happened to it, but the operation is likely to be complex and costly.
Nick Sloane, the South African engineer who led the operation to salvage the Costa Concordia cruise liner that sank in 2012, said in Italian media interviews on Friday that the operation would cost up to €15 million.
Of the 22 passengers and crew on board, 15 – including Mr Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares – were rescued after escaping on to a lifeboat.
The body of Canadian-Antiguan national Recaldo Thomas, who was working as a chef on the superyacht, was recovered at the scene of the sinking on Monday.
The boat trip was a celebration of Mr Lynch’s acquittal in a fraud case in the United States.
The businessman, who founded software giant Autonomy in 1996, was cleared in June of carrying out a large fraud relating to its sale to US company Hewlett Packard. – Agencies