At least one person has died and six others are missing after a luxury yacht was struck by a severe storm and sank off the coast of Palermo, Sicily’s capital. Among the missing is British tech magnate Mike Lynch, according to a source familiar with the rescue operation. Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacaris, was rescued, another source confirmed.
The 56-meter sailing yacht, the British-flagged Bayesian, sank with 22 people aboard on Monday, according to the coast guard. The missing persons include British, American, and Canadian nationals. Among the 15 survivors is a one-year-old child.
Storms and heavy rains have battered Italy in recent days, causing floods and landslides in the northern part of the country after weeks of extreme heat. Eight of the survivors were taken to local hospitals and are in stable condition, according to Italian media reports.
Charlotte, a 35-year-old British passenger traveling with her husband, colleagues from a London-based company, and friends, described how she lost sight of her daughter “for two seconds” after they fell into the water, before managing to grab her. “I immediately held her tight in the fury of the waves. Many were screaming. Thankfully, the lifeboat deployed, and 11 of us climbed aboard,” she recounted to the Italian news agency Ansa. She and her baby are hospitalized but are not in danger.
Among the survivors, who are mostly British, are also two Franco-British nationals, a Sri Lankan, a New Zealander, and an Irishman, according to media reports.
The captain of a nearby vessel told Reuters that when the storm hit, he turned on his engine to keep the boat under control and avoid a collision with the yacht. “We managed to keep the boat steady, and after the storm passed, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone,” Carsten Borner described to reporters.
He added that the other vessel “broke apart on the water and then sank.” Borner’s crew later found some of the survivors in a lifeboat, including three who were seriously injured, “a small baby and the owner’s wife,” and transferred them to his ship before the coast guard arrived.
Lynch, 59, was acquitted in June by a San Francisco court of fraud charges related to the sale of his software company, Autonomy, to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011. At the time, he said he was “thrilled” by the acquittal in the criminal trial, during which he denied any wrongdoing and accused HP of mishandling the merger.
The Italian coast guard has reported that divers are conducting searches at the wreck site, 49 meters deep. Prosecutors in the town of Termini Imerese have launched an investigation to determine the cause of the shipwreck.
