Tornado likely sank luxury yacht off coast of Sicily, officials say, as search for survivors continues

Police divers resumed searching Tuesday for six people believed trapped in the hull of a superyacht that sank in deep seas off Sicily, including a British tech magnate who was celebrating his recent acquittal on fraud charges with the people who had defended him at trial.

Civil protection officials said they believed the Bayesian, a 184-foot British-flagged yacht, had been struck by a tornado over the water. The ship had been moored about a half-mile offshore off Porticello near Palermo when a storm rolled and the vessel sank at about 5 a.m. local time on Monday. 

Grainy film from closed-circuit cameras from shore, broadcast on the website of the Giornale di Sicilia, showed the majestic, illuminated 246-foot mast of the Bayesian weathering the storm and then disappearing over the course of a minute.

Fifteen of the 22 people aboard survived, including a mother who reported holding her 1-year-old baby over the waves to save her. One body was recovered, identified by officials as the Antiguan-born on-board chef. The rest of the 10-person crew survived, including the captain whom prosecutors reportedly sought to interview.

“It’s a great, great tragedy,” said Britain’s ambassador to Italy, Edward Llewellyn, who visited Porticello on Tuesday. Britain sent four investigators to the scene, given the disaster involved a British-flagged ship and British citizens were among the missing.

Fire rescue officials have said the six other passengers will be considered missing until they are located in the wreckage. They include tycoon Mike Lynch, who was once hailed as Britain’s king of technology and was cleared in June of fraud and conspiracy charges in a U.S. federal trial related to Hewlett Packard’s $11 billion takeover of his company, Autonomy Corp.

Also unaccounted for are Christopher Morvillo, one of Lynch’s lawyers, and Jonathan Bloomer, a chairman at Morgan Stanley International and the former head of the Autonomy audit committee who testified in Lynch’s defense.

The wreckage of the luxury craft is some 164 feet underwater — far deeper than most recreational divers are certified for and a depth that requires special precautions. Recovery crews could only stay for 12-minute shifts, a measure that slowed their efforts to reach the cramped inside of the wreck.

Karsten Borner, the captain of the Sir Robert Baden Powell, which rescued the 15 survivors who managed to get into a lifeboat, said he was close enough to be able to see the Bayesian as the storm came in.

“A moment later, she was gone,” he said. “They said they went flat on the water and were sunk in two minutes,” Borner added, quoting the survivors.

The rotating search teams, each made up of two specialized cave divers, worked Tuesday to open up access points to get inside the wreck. They were using a remote-controlled underwater vehicle, or ROV, to help in the search.

The divers hadn’t been able to access the below-deck cabins because they were blocked by furniture that had shifted during the violent storm. Rescue crews said they assume the missing six are in those cabins because the storm struck when most would be sleeping, but the teams haven’t verified their presence there through portholes.

Luca Cari, a spokesman for the rescue teams, said the search was proceeding much more slowly than another big shipwreck in Italy, the 2012 Costa Concordia cruise ship that flipped on its side off Tuscany’s coast, because of the depth of the wreck and the limited space divers have to maneuver.

“That was much simpler. Here everything is more tight,” he said.

The outing was intended at least in part as a celebration of Lynch’s acquittal and a “looking forward to what was coming next,” said Reid Weingarten, a Washington attorney and a member of Lynch’s defense team who was not on the yacht.

“A lot of people went, a lot of people were planning to go and then of course this happened,” Weingarten said.

Some of the people who stood by Lynch throughout the ordeal were on board, including Morvillo, the lawyer, who Weingarten worked with and said “was like a brother.”

Morvillo’s wife, Neda, is also missing, according to his law firm Clifford Chance.

Aki Hussain, CEO of international insurer Hiscox Group, where Bloomer, the witness, was chairman, said the company was “deeply shocked and saddened by this tragic event.”

“Our thoughts are with all those affected, in particular our Chair, Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife Judy, who are among the missing, and with their family as they await further news from this terrible situation,” he added.

Among the survivors, the Emslie family was released from Palermo’s pediatric hospital on Tuesday where little Sofia had been kept overnight after her rescue. Her mother, Charlotte Golunski, had reported that she momentarily lost hold of the 1-year-old in the water but then managed to hold her up over the waves until a lifeboat inflated and they were both pulled to safety, doctors said.

The father, identified by ANSA news agency as James Emslie, also survived.

“They don’t talk much, primarily because they consider themselves survivors and they don’t understand why they survived given what they went through,” said Dr. Domenico Cipolla, head of the emergency room at Di Cristina Pediatric Hospital.

Speaking to reporters Tuesday, Cipolla said Golunski had reported that she and the baby were sleeping in the cabin and suddenly found themselves in the water, where they also found Emslie who had been in a different part of the ship. Cipolla said the parents had been in touch with other survivors, who are being housed at a nearby hotel and were waiting for other family members to arrive in Sicily.

The baby slept well overnight and all were released after final checks Tuesday morning, he said according to a videotaped interview posted on Palermo Today, adding that psychologists had been made available.

Among the other survivors was Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares. Hannah Lynch, reportedly the couple’s 18-year-old daughter, is among the missing.

The yacht’s registered owner is listed as Revtom Ltd., according to online maritime database Equasis. Bacares is listed as Revtom’s sole owner, according to corporate registration documents from the Isle of Man.

Its name, Bayesian, may be a reference to “Bayesian Inference,” one of the two main approaches to statistical machine learning and the one that was used by Lynch’s company.

The yacht, built in 2008 by the Italian firm Perini Navi, was carrying 12 passengers and 10 crew. According to online charter companies, it had been available for charter for about $215,000 a week and was notable for its massive aluminum mast, one of the tallest in the world.

The coast guard said to date there was no trace of fuel leaks from the wreckage.

In an unrelated event, Lynch’s co-defendant in the Autonomy trial who was also cleared, Stephen Chamberlain, was killed Sunday when he was hit by a car while running in Cambridgeshire, England, said Chamberlain’s lawyer, Gary Lincenberg.