The discovery came after the vessel sank this week in what some witnesses described as a waterspout, or a small tornado, during a violent downpour. No names were immediately released.
After three days of searching the hull of a sailing yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily, divers on Wednesday recovered the bodies of two passengers who were believed to have been trapped inside their cabins when the vessel went down, officials in Sicily said.
The yacht, the Bayesian, with 12 crew members and 10 passengers, was caught in what some witnesses described as a waterspout, essentially a small tornado on water, during a sudden and violent downpour in the pre-dawn hours of Monday.
The recovery of the two bodies was confirmed by Salvatore Cocina, head of Sicily’s civil protection agency. What looked like a green body bag was lifted from a vessel in Porticello, Sicily, on Wednesday afternoon and loaded onto a waiting ambulance as a large group of rescuers stood by in their uniforms.
On the dock, a crowd of reporters and bystanders watched on in near complete silence, as a church bell tolled in the background.
Although 15 people made it to safety and the yacht’s cook was confirmed dead, the fate of the remaining six people, including a British tech entrepreneur, Mike Lynch, had been formally unresolved until the update on Wednesday.
In addition to Mr. Lynch, the remaining people who had been identified as missing by the authorities were his daughter Hannah; Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International; his wife, Judy Bloomer; Christopher J. Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance; and his wife, Neda Morvillo.
They were part of a group of people celebrating a legal victory for Mr. Lynch, who was acquitted in June of fraud charges tied to the sale of his company, Autonomy, to the tech giant Hewlett-Packard.
The body of the yacht’s cook, Recaldo Thomas, who held Canadian and Antiguan citizenship, was recovered earlier from the water, the Sicilian civil protection agency said.
Deep sea divers with the Vigili del Fuoco, Italy’s firefighting corps, were able to reach the bodies after dealing with what Luca Cari, their spokesman, described as “very difficult” conditions.
The yacht had settled on its side, about 165 feet below the surface, and divers could only remain underwater for a limited amount of time. To complicate matters, they had to navigate through broken furnishings and electrical wiring that blocked the tight spaces inside the hull.
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