Days after seven people died in the sinking of the superyacht Bayesian off the coast of Sicily, Italian prosecutors suggested that the whole debacle could be a “human error”. The British yacht was carrying 22 passengers when it sank off the coast of Sicily on Monday. The ship sank after it was struck by a powerful type of wind called a downburst.
Seven people who died in the incident also included British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah. 15 others including Lynch’s wife survived the incident along with the yacht’s captain. On Saturday, Ambrogio Cartosio, the head of the prosecutor’s office in Termini Imerese, said in a press conference that his office has opened an initial investigation into manslaughter and negligent shipwreck.
“This tragedy would be even more heart-wrenching if our investigations were to prove that the sinking of the vessel was caused by actions not in accordance with the maritime code,” Cartosio said. in a press briefing. “We are only in the initial phase of the investigations .
.. At this stage, precisely because the investigation could develop in any way, we are absolutely not ruling anything out,” he furthered, making it clear that the investigation is not aimed at any single person.
The sleepy Italian port came to the centre of world news in just 16 minutes. So what happened within those 16 minutes? Let’s take a closer look. The 16-minute window Lynch was hosting a party with his friend on his luxury boat.
In June, he was acquitted after a lengthy trial in the US on charges that he had fraudulently inflated the value of his company, Autonomy, before selling it to Hewlett Packard in 2011. Among the notable people who died were Chairman of Morgan Stanley international Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife Judy; Mr Lynch’s lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda. Much of the focus for the investigators is now to understand what happened in the 16 minutes before the ship sank.
The authorities are investigating the conduct of the captain, 51-year-old James Cutfield from New Zealand who survived along with his eight crew members. “We didn’t see it coming,” he told Italian media while referring to the storm. This is his only public comment so far.
However, the head of the company that built the Bayesian, Giovanni Costantino, cast doubt over the proclamation. He told BBC that he is certain about a “litany of errors on board”. “At the back of the boat, a hatch must have been left open,” he said, “but also perhaps a side entrance for water to have poured inside.
" “Before the storm, the captain should have closed every opening, lifted anchor, turned on the engine, pointed into the wind and lowered the keel. That would have stabilised the vessel, they would have been able to traverse the storm and continue their cruise in comfort,” he added. Instead of this, while looking for wreckage, the rescuers found the keel raised, 50 meters in the water.
“The Bayesian was a model for many other vessels because of its stability and exceptionally high performance,’ Costantino said. “There was absolutely no problem with it. If water hadn’t surged in, it was unsinkable," he exclaimed.
16 minutes are crucial because this was the time between the yacht’s lost power and the GPS signal being lost, indicating the moment it sank, BBC reported. Now the investigators will try to find what happened in that period along with any measures taken to mitigate the extreme weather. Who was on the watch overnight? Rino Casilli, one of Sicily’s top ship surveyors, questioned why no one realised that a storm was brewing.
“There should have been two members of the crew taking turns to be on watch overnight, given the storm warning,” he told BBC . “And it should have been moored in the harbour, not out at sea," he added. It is still not clear exactly how many people were on watch duty.
While the five bodies were found on the first day, access for the emergency teams was extremely difficult since the yacht remained largely intact with its furniture obstructing entry. The coastguard compared it to an “18-storey building full of water”. While the wreckage is extremely important for the investigation, bringing Bayesian to the surface could take six to eight weeks and cost 15 million euros by some estimates, BBC reported.
Hence, while the divers’ painstaking work to recover the dead has ended, the investigators’ hunt for answers has commenced. With inputs from agencies..
