The body of UK tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch has been recovered from the wreckage of the superyacht Bayesian, three days after it sank off the coast of Sicily, according to Italian officials.
Six people, including Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, have been missing since Monday, when Bayesian went down in an intense storm near Palermo.
A fifth body was pulled from the sunken yacht on Thursday morning. Divers searching the wreck off the coast of Porticello are still looking for the sixth missing passenger, whom the Italian coastguard said is a woman.
That suggests that the other bodies recovered are likely to include Christopher Morvillo of the law firm Clifford Chance and Jonathan Bloomer, chair of insurance group Hiscox and Morgan Stanley International, who were also on board Bayesian when it sank.
Their wives, Neda Morvillo and Judy Bloomer, were also on the vessel.
No formal identification of the bodies has been announced by the Italian authorities.
A spokesperson for Lynch’s family declined to comment.
The trip on Bayesian had been planned as a celebration of Lynch’s recent acquittal on US fraud charges, after a 12-year legal battle over the $11bn sale of his software group Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
Morvillo represented Lynch in his recent US case, and Bloomer appeared at the trial as a witness for the defence.
Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, was one of 15 people rescued in the early hours of Monday morning. The body of one crew member was recovered on Monday.
Italian prosecutors are investigating the exact circumstances of the shipwreck after some eyewitnesses claimed the yacht sank in just a matter of minutes.
This is a developing story