By Giselda Vagnoni
PORTICELLO, Italy (Reuters) -Two bodies found aboard the sunken wreck of a yacht belonging to British tech magnate Mike Lynch's family were brought to land on Wednesday, while two more corpses have been located in the capsized vessel, according to sources.
Six people, including Lynch and his daughter, are still unaccounted for after the British-flagged Bayesian sank early on Monday off Sicily after it was hit by a ferocious storm.
The identities of the victims found on Wednesday were not immediately given. One of the bodies belonged to a heavily built man, a source close to rescue operations said, while the second was that of a woman, Italian news agency Adnkronos said.
Two black body bags were brought into the harbour of Porticello near Palermo aboard a Fire Brigades boat and lifted up onto the quayside.
Divers and specialist rescuers have been searching inside the hull of the sunken yacht since Monday. The victims are believed to be trapped in cabins, which have proved extremely hard to get to, with divers only able to stay in the vessel for 8-10 minutes before having to re-surface.
Fifteen people managed to escape the yacht before it capsized in the pre-dawn tempest, while the body of the onboard chef, Canadian-Antiguan national Recaldo Thomas, was found near the wreck hours after the disaster.
That left six passengers missing - Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah; Judy and Jonathan Bloomer, a non-executive chair of Morgan Stanley International; and Clifford Chance lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife, Neda Morvillo.
The wreck of the Bayesian, a 56-metre-long (184-ft) superyacht, is lying sideways at a depth of around 50 metres. Besides the diving team, the coast guard has deployed a remotely operated vehicle to scan the seabed and take underwater pictures and videos that it said may provide "useful and timely elements" for prosecutors looking into the disaster.
MYSTERY
The coast guard has been questioning survivors, including the captain of the Bayesian, and passengers on the yacht that was moored next to it who witnessed the ship going down, judicial sources said.
No one is under investigation at the moment, sources added.
Experts have been at a loss to explain how a large luxury vessel, presumed to have top-class fittings and safety features, could have sunk within minutes, as recounted by witnesses. The yacht anchored next to it was unharmed by the storm.
The Bayesian, which was owned by Lynch's wife, was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini in 2008 and last refitted in 2020. It had the world's tallest aluminium mast, measuring 72 metres, according to its makers.
Lynch, 59, is one of the UK's best-known tech entrepreneurs and has been referred to as the country's Bill Gates.
He built the UK's largest software firm, Autonomy, which was sold to HP for $11 billion in 2011, after which the deal spectacularly unravelled with the U.S. tech giant accusing him of fraud, resulting in a lengthy trial.
Lynch was acquitted on all charges by a jury in San Francisco in June. Morvillo had represented him at the trial, while Bloomer was a character witness on his behalf.
Bayesian's captain James Cutfield, a 51-year-old New Zealander who survived the shipwreck, was a "very good sailor" and "very well respected" in the Mediterranean, his brother Mark told The New Zealand Herald.
Matthew Schanck, chair of the Maritime Search and Rescue Council, a UK-based non-profit organisation that trains sea rescuers, said the Bayesian was the victim of a "high impact" weather-related incident.
"If it was a water spout, which it appears to be, it's what I would class as like a black swan event," he told Reuters, referring to a rare and unpredictable phenomenon.
(Writing by Alvise Armellini and Crispian Balmer; Additional reporting by Guglielmo Mangiapane, Wladimiro Pantaleone and Matteo Negri, editing by Gavin Jones, Bernadette Baum and Sharon Singleton)
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