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Five bodies have been found by divers searching the wreckage of Mike Lynch’s superyacht Bayesian, which sank off the coast of Sicily.
Four bodies were pulled from the sunken yacht on Wednesday and one more has yet to be removed from the wreckage, Salvatore Cocina, head of Sicily’s civil protection agency, told the Financial Times.
Lynch, one of the UK’s best-known technology entrepreneurs, is among six missing passengers after Bayesian went down in an intense storm on Monday off the coast of Porticello, near Palermo.
His 18-year-old daughter and Jonathan Bloomer, chair of insurance group Hiscox and Morgan Stanley International, are also missing.
Divers, assisted by an underwater drone, gained access to Bayesian’s cabins on Wednesday after two days of struggling to find a way through debris inside the Lynch family’s 56-metre superyacht.
The trip had been intended to celebrate the Autonomy founder’s recent acquittal by a US jury, after a 12-year legal battle over the software group’s $11bn sale to Hewlett-Packard.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 people rescued in the early hours of Monday morning.
Italian prosecutors are investigating how the yacht sank in just a matter of minutes, leaving one crew member dead.
“Everything happened extremely fast,” Vincenzo Zagarola, a coastguard official, said.
He added the wind that hit the British-registered yacht reached 60 knots (more than 110km/h), which is characterised as a Force 11 or “violent storm” on the Beaufort scale.
The speed of the sinking of the 540-tonne yacht remains the biggest mystery about the accident, given it would normally take much longer for such a large, modern vessel to founder even if it was laid flat on its side by the wind or completely overturned.
So rapid was the sinking that the crew did not appear to have time to send a Mayday distress signal.
The first sign of the emergency was the firing of a red flare from a life raft that was seen by the coastguard and a skipper of a boat anchored nearby, who rescued the 15 survivors.
By the time the coastguard reached the location of the flare, the yacht had completely sunk.
Charlotte Golunski, a partner at investment firm Invoke Capital, founded by Lynch, described to medical staff how she remembered being asleep in her cabin and suddenly waking up in the water with her small daughter Sophia, according to Domenico Cipolla, director of the emergency unit at Palermo’s Di Cristina paediatric hospital.
When the 36-year-old mother lost the grip of her toddler’s hand, she said it was like “looking death in the eye”, according to Cipolla. Golunski went on to say how it all happened in one or two minutes.
The family was discharged from hospital and together with other survivors are receiving counselling at a hotel in Santa Flavia.
Fabio Genco, head of Palermo emergency medical services, said: “The little girl’s dad and other people said that some objects dropped on their heads during the sinking of the boat. The dad said that everything lasted three to five minutes. Survivors talked about being in the dark in the middle of the sea.”
In the town of Termini Imerese, the public prosecutor’s office has launched an investigation into the accident, in collaboration with the coastguard of Porticello, “to establish the exact dynamic of the shipwreck”, the coastguard announced.
This article has been updated; an earlier version was published in error.