The captain of the luxury yacht that sank a week ago off the Italian island of Sicily is being investigated by the Public Prosecutor's Office on suspicion of multiple manslaughter, according to Italian media.
Prosecutors in Termini Imerese, a town in the Palermo metropolitan area in the north of the island, announced at the weekend that they were investigating potential offences of ‘involuntary shipwreck and multiple negligent homicide’ following the sinking of the ‘Bayesian’, owned by British tech tycoon Mike Lynch, one of the seven fatalities in the disaster, refusing to give further details at this stage of the investigation.
The Italian press reports today, however, that after being heard again on Sunday by the local authorities for around two hours, Captain James Cutfield is suspected of the alleged offences of shipwreck and multiple homicide by negligence, and other crew members may be involved in the investigation.
While the six surviving Lynch guest passengers returned to London on Sunday, the nine crew members of the ‘Bayesian’ remain in Sicily, in a hotel near Porticello.
Among the questions that the Public Prosecutor's Office wants to clarify - and which it says will only be possible once the wreckage of the ship has been recovered from the bottom of the sea - is the delay of more than half an hour (32 minutes) between the start of the shipwreck and the firing of a distress flare from one of the lifeboats, which took place at 04: 38 in the early hours of 19 August, the role of the crew member who was on duty on the bridge, who had the latest weather warnings on the screens and the button to seal all the sailboat's doors and hatches, and whether one of the side doors was left open, allowing water to enter.
The authorities have confirmed that autopsies will be carried out between Tuesday and Thursday on the seven bodies recovered after the shipwreck by teams of divers, in an operation that lasted several days due to the difficulties in accessing the wreckage of the yacht, which lies at the bottom of the sea at a depth of more than 50 meters.
James Cutfield was one of the 15 survivors of the sinking of the ‘Bayesian’, which left seven passengers dead. In addition to Mike Lynch, 59, and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, the president of Morgan Stanley International, Jonathan Bloomer, his wife, Anne Elizabeth Judith Bloomer, a Lynch lawyer, Chris Morvillo, and his wife, Nada Morvillo, and a crew member, Ricardo Thomas, who worked as a cook on board, died.
Mike Lynch, nicknamed the ‘British Bill Gates’, was celebrating on this cruise with friends, partners and lawyers his acquittal last June in a fraud case in the United States, when a mini-tornado hit the ‘Bayesian’, anchored off Porticello in northern Sicily, during a strong storm.
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