At least one person was killed and six others went missing after a luxury yacht sank off Sicily early on Monday after being struck by an unexpected storm. The missing persons include British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter. In a statement, the Italian coast guard informed that the British-flagged "Bayesian," a 56-metre-long (184-ft) sailboat, was carrying 22 people and was anchored just offshore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by ferocious weather, news agency Reuters reported.
According to eyewitnesses, the yacht vanished quickly beneath the waves shortly before dawn. Fifteen people, however, managed to escape before it went down, including Lynch's wife, Angela Bacares, who owned the boat, and a one-year-old girl, as per the Reuters report. The names of the deceased and missing were not immediately released.
According to Reuters, a person familiar with the rescue operation confirmed that Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, were not accounted for. Salvatore Cocina, head of the Civil Protection in Sicily, stated that the list of missing persons included Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and Chris Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance. Italian media stated that the dead man was the yacht's onboard chef.
The Italian Coast Guard said the missing also included British, American, and Canadian nationalities. According to the survivors, the trip was organised by Lynch for his work colleagues. "The wind was very strong.
Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude," a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters. The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the winds surged, he had turned on the engine to keep control of his vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian, which had been anchored alongside him. "We managed to keep the ship in position, and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone," Karsten Borner told journalists.
The other boat "went flat on the water and then down," he further stated. He also said that his crew then found some of the survivors on a liferaft—including a baby girl and her mother—and took them on board before the coast guard picked them up. Lynch, 59, is one of Britain's best-known tech entrepreneurs.
He built the country's largest software firm, Autonomy, from his ground-breaking research at Cambridge University, and became known as Britain's Bill Gates..
