Mike Lynch superyacht latest: Manslaughter probe to look at crew responsibility

A top prosecutor in Sicily outlined the order in which the bodies of six people who had been missing following the yacht sinking were retrieved, calling the incident a “very grave tragedy”.

Public prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio said: “These six persons who tried desperately to save themselves were finally retrieved.

“First of all, four of them. Jonathan Bloomer the banker, Christopher Morvillo the lawyer, and all four of them were retrieved from inside the yacht which was 50 metres down.

“Then, later, the other two were also retrieved.

“Michael Lynch on the 23rd, yesterday, and then the 18-year-old daughter of Michael Lynch, Hannah, was found yesterday morning.

“It is a very grave tragedy and in order to reduce the dimensions of the tragedy, we have called upon the co-operation of the firefighters, firefighting divers, who have shown incredible courage and skill, who carried out a very difficult mission indeed and have allowed us to inspect properly the wreck for bodies.”

The passengers who died were probably asleep, prosecutors said, and this is the reason they failed to escape.

Raffaele Cammarano, the prosecutor of the case, suggested “they were asleep whereas the others weren’t”.

He was asked if there was anyone at the time available to alert them.

Mr Cammarano said: “That is precisely what we are trying to ascertain from the statements made during the interrogation of the survivors – an essential point in the inquiry obviously.”

A diver described the emotional moment the final body was pulled from the wreckage of the Bayesian when they all stopped to applaud as Hannah Lynch made it to shore.

Inspector Vincenzo Nardoni, a diver drafted in from the fire brigade’s unit in Naples, said: “It was an emotional liberation, a relief of stress.

“Because stress is our daily bread. We work on call and in emergencies, and we intervene immediately. So stress is our baggage, is what we bring with us.”

He added “We had to revise the scene from a different angle from the way we’d normally see it, and that made everything more difficult.’

“We entered the confined spaces, having already performed evaluations on the safe point to enter inside the yacht. We found the safest spot and got inside from there.

“But inside it was a very confusing place, with wardrobes and furniture whirling all around us, and lots of mirrors reflecting back our lights at us.

“The bodies were all wedged in tight spots, with furniture on top or beside them. They were all stuck there.”

The prosecutor in charge of the case, Raffaele Cammarano, suggested that some passengers may have been asleep when others were awake.

Asked why they were not woken up or alerted, he said that is something investigators are trying to work out from the statements of the survivors.

He called it an “essential” part of the inquiry.

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The press conference heard several bodies onboard the sunken yacht were found in a single cabin which was not theirs.

Mr Cammarano said investigators currently do not know the reason for them being discovered in the same cabin.

The chief of the Palermo fire service, Bentivoglio Fiandra, said the yacht pinned to the right and suggested people tried to go on the other side, taking refuge in cabins in the higher part of the wreck.