PORTICELLO: Divers searching for six missing people following the sinking of a superyacht off Sicily have found four bodies, a source close to the search said.

The discovery brings the confirmed death toll from the disaster off the Italian island to five, after the body of a man believed to be the yacht’s chef was recovered hours after the sinking on Monday. There were no immediate details about the bodies found. British tech tycoon Mike Lynch and his teenage daughter Hannah are among the six people missing.

The 56-metre British-flagged “Bayesian” had been anchored some 700 metres off Porticello when it was struck by a waterspout — akin to a mini-tornado — during a pre-dawn storm. It sank within minutes.

Fifteen people were rescued, including Lynch’s wife and a woman with a one-year-old baby. But the tech entrepreneur and his daughter, his lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda, and Jonathan Bloomer, the chair of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy, were all reported missing.

Shortly before the news emerged of the bodies found, an eyewitness saw more than half a dozen boats leave the port of Porticello all within minutes of each other. Some of them later returned with body bags then carried by emergency service workers into a tent on the quay.

Firefighters had earlier said that searching the yacht, which is largely intact and resting on the seabed some 50 metres down, was a “long and complex” operation. Despite eyewitness testimonies that the 75-metre mast had snapped, reports suggested that it too survived the incident.

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 an $11 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.

Published in Dawn, August 22nd, 2024