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Italian officials open shipwreck and manslaughter investigation in superyacht sinking that killed 7
Prosecutors in Italy said Saturday they have opened an investigation into shipwreck and manslaughter after a superyacht capsized during a storm off the coast of Sicily, killing seven people onboard.
Termini Imerese prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio confirmed the investigation but said no suspect is currently identified. Investigators are hoping to salvage the ship, which is lying on the seabed 164 feet underwater, but that may take months.
“We are only in the initial phase of the investigation. We can’t exclude any sort of development at present,” he told reporters at a news conference.
The main question investigators are focusing on is how a sailing vessel deemed “unsinkable” by its manufacturer, Italian shipyard Perini Navi, sank while a nearby sailboat remained largely unscathed.
SuperYacht Times
Civil protection officials said they believe the yacht, which featured a distinctive 246-feet aluminum mast, was struck by a tornado over the water, known as a waterspout, and sank quickly.
Rescuers on Friday brought ashore the last of seven bodies from the sinking of The Bayesian, an 184-foot British-flagged luxury yacht that went down in a storm while docked near the small Sicilian village of Porticello early Monday. The sailboat was carrying a crew of 10 people and 12 passengers.
The body was believed to be that of Hannah Lynch, 18, the daughter of British tech magnate Mike Lynch. His body was recovered on Thursday. He had been celebrating his recent acquittal on fraud charges with his family and the people who had defended him at trial in the United States. His wife, Angela Bacares, was among the 15 survivors who escaped in a lifeboat.
“The Lynch family is devastated, in shock and is being comforted and supported by family and friends. Their thoughts are with everyone affected by the tragedy,” a spokesperson for the family said in a statement issued Friday.
ALBERTO PIZZOLI/AFP/Getty
The other five victims are Christopher Morvillo, one of Lynch’s U.S. lawyers, and his wife, Neda; Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley’s London-based investment banking subsidiary, and his wife, Judy; and Recaldo Thomas, the yacht’s chef.
Rescuers struggled for four days to find all the bodies, making only slow headway through the interior of the wreck because of how far below the surface it is. Searchers used an underwater drone as part of the recovery efforts.
Area resident Maria Vizzo told CBS News that the region has “never seen something like this.”
“Sunday night here we saw the end of the world in Porticello,” Vizzo said in Italian. “The town of Porticello is mourning these people who died. Everyone is talking about it on the radio, and in the news. We are here. We pray to the Lord, and we ask for a blessing for those who died.”
Workers removing tree branches near a historic cathedral in Chelm, Poland, unearthed something unexpected when they came upon two children’s skeletons in a shallow burial pit where no gravesites are marked, the government’s Culture Ministry said.
Neither skeleton was buried in a coffin and one of the children was buried with the characteristics of an anti-vampire burial, Dr. Stanisława Gołuba, the archaeologist leading the research, said in a Facebook post. The child’s head was separated from its body, the post said, and the skull was facing down into the ground arranged on a stone. This, plus the way the skeletons were oriented, appears to be consistent with ancient burial methods used to prevent a person thought to be a demonic entity from exiting the grave, Gołuba said.
The skeletons appeared to be from the Early Middle Ages.
The children’s skeletons were removed from their graves, documented and waiting for further analysis, the statement said.
It’s the most recent in a series of findings in Poland of remains buried in ways that suggest people at the time believed they were dealing with vampires or other supernatural entities.
In 2022, Polish researchers found the remains of a woman at a gravesite in the village of Pień with a sickle around her neck and a triangular padlock on her foot. According to ancient beliefs, the padlock was supposed to prevent a deceased person thought to be a vampire from returning from the dead. The sickle was thought to cut the neck if the corpse tried to rise from the grave.
Professor Dariusz Polinski of the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun said this type of practice became common throughout Poland in the 17th century in response to a reported vampire epidemic. In addition to practices with a sickle, sometimes corpses were burned, smashed with stones or had their heads and legs cut off.
Six so-called “vampire skeletons” were also found at a cemetery in northwest Poland in 2013. Each was buried with either a sickle laid across their necks or stones placed beneath their jaws said Lesley Gregoricka of the University of South Alabama who led the research team.
contributed to this report.
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