Mike Lynch invited friends and family on the sailboat (File)
Porticello, Italy:
Divers searching for the latest missing person after a superyacht sank off the coast of Sicily found a body on Friday believed to be the teenage daughter of British technology magnate Mike Lynch, who also died.
The discovery, confirmed to AFP by the Italian coast guard, brings to seven the final number of people killed in the sinking of the “Bayesian”, which went down before dawn off the Italian island on Monday.
The bodies of Lynch, a celebrated tech entrepreneur and investor, and four other passengers were found Wednesday and Thursday, with his 18-year-old daughter Hannah the only one still missing.
Emergency services had found the body of another man, believed to be the yacht’s chef, a few hours after it sank during a sudden storm.
Lynch had invited friends and family on the sailboat to celebrate his recent acquittal in a major American fraud case.
But as the 56-metre British-flagged yacht was anchored at Porticello, near Palermo, it was hit by a waterspout similar to a mini tornado.
It sank within minutes.
Italian authorities launched what they called a “delicate” search involving specialized divers, boats from several emergency services and helicopters.
‘Heartbroken’
Fifteen people had been rescued from the ship, including Lynch’s wife, who was believed to be waiting in a hotel in Sicily for news of her husband and daughter.
18-year-old Hannah had just finished her final exams and, according to reports in the British media, had secured a place to study English literature at the University of Oxford.
Friends of the teenager told The Times newspaper that she was kind and smart, but also a fervent feminist.
The bodies of Lynch’s lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda, and Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy, were recovered Wednesday.
Morvillo’s firm Clifford Chance paid tribute to the lawyer and his wife, saying all were “heartbroken by the tragic death… and are still coming to terms with this terrible loss”.
The Bloomer family described their “unimaginable grief” and said Jonathan and Judy had been together for five decades.
“Our only consolation is that they are still together,” the family said.
The Lynch family has not yet commented publicly.
Many questions remain about why the yacht sank, and so quickly, while other boats nearby were unaffected.
On Thursday, the head of the company that built the boat said the tragedy could have been prevented.
“Everything that has been done reveals a very long list of errors,” said Giovanni Costantino, head of Italy’s Sea Group, which includes the Perini Navi company that built Bayesian in 2008.
Bad weather forecast
He told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that bad weather had been forecast and that all passengers should have gathered at a pre-arranged meeting point, with all doors and hatches closed.
“Instead, it took on water while the guests were still in the hut. They got caught in a trap, those poor people got caught like mice in a trap,” he said.
Lynch, 59, was acquitted of all charges by a San Francisco court in June after being accused of $11 billion in fraud related to the sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
The Bayesian, owned by his family, had a 75-meter mast, the tallest aluminum sail mast in the world, according to Charter World’s website.
The retrieval would likely cost around 15 million euros and take “six to eight weeks”, according to the salvage engineer who led the operation to recover the cruise ship Costa Concordia, which sank off the coast of Italy in 2012.
To recover the yacht, the mast could be removed from the seabed, but the boat would be lifted in its entirety using a giant crane and a team of 40 specialist divers, South African engineer Nick Sloane told Repubblica daily .
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)