Italian authorities said a manslaughter investigation has been launched into the sinking of the superyacht Bayesian, which killed six passengers and one crew member.
On Saturday, Aug. 24, Ambrogio Cartosio, the Chief Prosecutor of Termini Imerese, spoke at a press conference in Sicily, where he announced, “The Prosecutor’s Office of Termini Imerese has opened a case file, currently against unknown persons, hypothesizing the crimes of negligent shipwreck and manslaughter, but we are only in an initial phase. We do not exclude that there may be developments of any kind.”
Cartosio added that it would be extremely “painful if the development of the inquiry were to demonstrate that this tragedy, this terrible tragedy, was caused by behaviors that were not perfectly adequate to the behavior that everyone had to have in managing this ship.”
He also later confirmed that, per Italian law, the captain and crew of the ship would not be obliged to stay in Italy at this stage.
“In Italy, there isn’t any legislation to hold people unless they have been arrested, and thank goodness for this in a sense, as otherwise we would be living in a state that is not very free. Of course, we are hoping there is a lot of collaboration,” he said.
Though authorities were unable to answer many questions due to the ongoing nature of the investigation, Cartosio said that there may be involvement in the investigation by foreign judicial authorities.
“There will be developments, but this is not the moment to talk about them,” he said.
Elsewhere in the press conference, Girolamo Bentivoglio Fiandra, commander of the Palermo Fire Department, spoke more about the sinking of the yacht, detailing that it “sank stern first and then settled on its side.”
The announcement of the investigation comes as authorities formally identified the seven victims of the tragedy in the same press conference.
Cartosio confirmed the deaths of chef Recaldo Thomas; British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch and his daughter, Hannah Lynch; Christopher Morvillo and his wife, Neda; and Morgan Stanley International chairman Jonathan Bloomer and his wife, Judy.
He later said that autopsies on the victims have not yet been carried out.
The Bayesian, a 183-foot British-flagged vessel carrying 22 people aboard, sank around 5 a.m. local time on Monday, Aug. 19, due to a “violent storm” off the coast of Porticello, according to an Italian Coast Guard statement previously obtained.
The yacht’s seaworthiness is being called into question after it began taking on water and then suddenly flipped onto its side during a severe storm, Giovanni Costantino, the head of The Italian Sea Group, told RAI state television, according to the Associated Press.
“The ship sank because it took on water,” Costantino said. “From where, the investigators will say.”
The ship maker’s owner previously told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera, that he believes those on board should not have been in their cabins, which he claims they were, when the Bayesian sank.
“Everything that has been done reveals a very long sum of errors,” Costantino said in the interview, translated from Italian. “The people should not have been in the cabins, the boat should not have been at anchor. And then why didn’t the crew know about the incoming disturbance?”
Lynch and his family — including wife Angela Bacares, who was rescued along with 14 others — had been celebrating his recent acquittal on fraud charges in the U.S. after a years-long legal battle.
