Divers searching the wreck of a superyacht that sank off Sicily found the bodies of five passengers on Wednesday and searched for one more as questions intensified about why the vessel sank so quickly when a nearby sailboat remained largely unscathed. Rescue crews brought four body bags ashore into port at Porticello. Salvatore Cocina, head of the Sicily civil protection agency, said a fifth body had been located.
Divers at the scene said they would try to recover it on Thursday while continuing the search for the sixth. The discovery made clear the operation to search the hull on the seabed 50 meters (164 feet) underwater had quickly turned into a recovery one, not a rescue, given the amount of time that had passed and with no signs of life emerging over three days of searching . The Bayesian, a 56-meter (184-foot) British-flagged yacht, went down in a storm early on Monday as it was moored about a kilometer (a half-mile) offshore.
Civil protection officials said they believed the ship was struck by a tornado over the water, known as a waterspout, and sank quickly. Fifteen people escaped in a lifeboat and were rescued by a nearby sailboat. One body was recovered on Monday — that of the ship’s chef, Recaldo Thomas, of Antigua.
Thomas was born in Canada, according to his cousin David Isaac, but would visit his parents’ homeland of Antigua as a child, moving permanently to the tiny eastern Caribbean island in his early 20s. Italian officials previously listed Antigua and .