Five bodies were found on Wednesday aboard the sunken wreck of a yacht belonging to the wife of British tech magnate Mike Lynch, sources close to the rescue operation said.
The authorities did not immediately give the identities of the victims. Three of the bodies were brought ashore and taken to nearby hospitals for formal identification. The fourth corpse was being taken to land as evening set in.
Two of the dead were Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter. Local authorities in Sicily declined to comment on the report.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56m-long (184ft) superyacht was carrying 22 people and anchored off the port of Porticello when it was hit by a fierce, pre-dawn storm on Monday.
Lynch, 59, was one of the UK’s best-known tech entrepreneurs and had invited friends to join him on the yacht to celebrate his recent acquittal in a US fraud trial.
Besides Lynch and his daughter, the other people unaccounted for after the disaster were Judy and Jonathan Bloomer, a non-executive chair of Morgan Stanley International; and Clifford Chance lawyer, Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda Morvillo.
Specialist rescuers have been searching inside the hull of the sunken yacht for the past two days. The victims were believed to have been trapped in cabins, which have proved extremely hard to get to, with divers only able to stay in the vessel for 8-10 minutes before having to re-surface.
Fifteen people managed to escape the yacht before it capsized in the pre-dawn tempest, while the body of the onboard chef, Canadian-Antiguan national Recaldo Thomas, was found near the wreck hours after the disaster.
The Bayesian is lying on its side at a depth of around 50m, apparently largely intact.
Besides the diving team, the Coast Guard has deployed a remotely operated vehicle to scan the seabed and take underwater pictures and videos that it said may provide “useful and timely elements” for prosecutors looking into the disaster.
