Four bodies have been recovered from the yacht that sank off the coast of Sicily this week, a person involved in the search and rescue operation confirms.
Their identities were not immediately clear.
Six passengers had remained missing after the Bayesian went into the water early on Monday, Aug. 19, following a storm.
The missing were identified as Mike Lynch, a British tech entrepreneur, and his daughter Hannah, as well as Chairman of Morgan Stanley International Jonathan Bloomer, his wife, Judy, and New York City-based lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife, Neda.
The Bayesian, a 183-foot vessel, sank around 5 a.m. local time on Monday while moored about a half mile from the the coast of Porticello, the Italian coast guard said in a statement that was previously obtained.
At the time there were 22 people on board, including 12 passengers and 10 crew, per the coast guard.
In the aftermath of the sinking, 15 people were soon rescued, according to the coast guard, while a body was also retrieved near the vessel and later identified in news reports as the chef, Ricardo Thomas.
Lunch’s wife, Angela Bacares, is one of the individuals who was rescued, as previously reported.
Mike Lynch.
Dan Kitwood/Getty
A source close to the survivors said that the passengers were celebrating after Lynch was acquitted in June in a financial fraud trial in the U.S.
“That’s why he took his closest friends and colleagues on the trip,” the source said.
Morvillo had represented Lynch in the fraud case and other firm employees were on the Bayesian as well, a spokesperson for Clifford Chance, his law firm, said in a statement.
Lynch later told Britain’s Sunday Times in a July 27 story that he would’ve died while serving his prison sentence due to his age and lung infection had he been convicted.
“I have various medical things that would have made it difficult to survive,” Lynch, a father of two children — Hannah, 18, and another daughter, 21 — told the paper.
After reports of the tech entrepreneur’s disappearance, Danny Fortson, who interviewed Lynch for the Sunday Timesstory, said he was “reeling.”
“The terrible irony is that when we sat down last month, he made it clear that he felt he had won a new lease on life, that his acquittal in America gave him a “second life,’ ” Fortson wrote in a social media post.
Witnesses said the Bayesian was anchored in front of the Porticello port when the storm struck in the early morning hours on Monday, per Italian newspaper Giornale di Sicilia.
“That boat was all lit up,” a man told the newspaper.
“At about 4:30 in the morning it was gone,” the man said. “A beautiful boat where there had been a party. A normal day of vacation spent happily at sea turned into a tragedy.”
