Divers find two bodies in sunken luxury yacht off Sicily, source says

ROME: Divers scouring the wreck of the luxury yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily have found two bodies inside it, a source close to rescue operations said on Wednesday (Aug 21).
One of the bodies belonged to a heavily built man, the source said.
Rescue officials have been looking for six missing people, including British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter and Jonathan Bloomer, a non-executive chair of Morgan Stanley International.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56m-long superyacht was anchored off the port of Porticello, near Palermo, when it was struck by a waterspout – akin to a mini-tornado – before dawn on Monday.
Ten crew members and 12 passengers were on board.
Fifteen people survived, while the body of the onboard chef, Canadian-Antiguan national Recaldo Thomas, was found near the wreck hours after the disaster.
Search operations, which involved specialist divers aided by an underwater drone, continued until late on Tuesday and resumed at first light on Wednesday morning, firefighters said.
AFP reporters saw a steady stream of boats on Wednesday morning going in and out of the harbour of Porticello, east of Palermo, ferrying divers to and from the search site.
Firefighters said on Tuesday evening that divers had entered the inside of the wreck, but that it was a “long and complex” operation.
The yacht is largely intact, resting on the seabed some 50m down.
Despite eyewitness testimonies that the 75m mast had snapped, reports on Wednesday suggested that it too, survived the incident.
A coast guard official, Captain Vincenzo Zagarola, had told Italian radio on Tuesday morning that it was “difficult to imagine” that the search would end well.
But experts noted that superyachts such as the “Bayesian” were designed with watertight subdivisions.
“There are records of survivors found in such air pockets,” noted Dr Jean-Baptiste Souppez, a UK engineering expert and fellow of the Royal Institution of Naval Architects, in a commentary provided by the Science Media Centre.
He noted the case of Nigerian sailor Harrison Okene, who was rescued in 2013 after spending nearly three days trapped in an air pocket after his ship capsized in rough seas off the Nigerian coast.
But he added: “Whether air pockets formed on the Bayesian is simply impossible to predict.”
The passengers were guests of Lynch – an entrepreneur sometimes referred to as Britain’s Bill Gates – to celebrate his acquittal in a massive US fraud case.
The 59-year-old was acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court in June after he was accused of a US$11 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
Among the survivors was Charlotte Golunski, board director of a company founded by Lynch, who has described how she briefly lost hold of her one-year-old daughter before grabbing her again. Both were plucked to safety.
Fabio Genco, a member of the Palermo Emergency Medical Services who was among the team that treated the child, described the “apocalyptic” situation he found on arriving at the scene.
“The word that the mother and all the injured kept repeating was ‘darkness’, the darkness that they experienced during the shipwreck,” he told the BBC’s Newsnight programme. 
“They spoke of about five minutes, maybe from three to five minutes, from the moment the boat was lifted, raised by the waves of the sea, until it sank.”
He said the survivors rescued had been in shock: “There were truly apocalyptic scenes where everyone was searching and hoping to find the people who at that moment, were not present or just missing.”
All the survivors treated in hospital have been discharged, he confirmed.
The speed with which the yacht sank, and the fact that other boats around it were unaffected, was extraordinary.
Some key questions remain, including whether the keel, which provides a counterbalance to the towering mast, was down when the storm hit.
Matthew Schanck, from the Maritime Search and Rescue Council, told AFP what happened was “pretty unprecedented”, describing it as a “black swan event” – something that was unlikely, but had a big impact.
The yacht was hit by a waterspout, which UK meteorologist Peter Inness described as a “narrow column of rotating air below a thunderstorm that occurs over water”.
Like tornadoes, they suck up air in a rotating motion. Many are fairly inconsequential, but some can pack winds of more than 100kmh, said Inness.
Jean-Marie Dumon, a former naval officer now with the GICAN, the French maritime industry association, added that conditions with winds of 100kmh or more can “create completely anarchic sea conditions which can cause capsizing”.