Superyacht tragedy: Bodies recovered from The Bayesian in search for tech billionaire Mike Lynch and guests

The bodies of five people have been pulled from a sunken superyacht as a rescue mission becomes a recovery operation.

Specialist divers recovered five bodies from The Bayesian, a 56-metre-British-flagged yacht, which sunk off Sicily on Monday after a freak storm.

British tech billionaire Mike Lynch, his daughter Hannah and four other guests had been missing since the ship went down, with Thursday’s rescue mission diminishing any hope that the people may have been alive in trapped air bubbles.

One body is yet to be recovered.

It is understood that the bodies of the guests were trapped in bedrooms with mattresses blocking the doors.

Although the bodies are yet to be formally identified, Mr Lynch and his daughter are believed to be amongst the five recovered.

Rescue crews unloaded three body bags from rescue vessels that pulled into port at Porticello.

Salvatore Cocina, head of the Sicily civil protection agency, said two other bodies had also been found in the wreckage for a total of five.

The operation to search the hull on the seabed 50 meters underwater had quickly turned into a recovery given the amount of time that had passed, maritime experts said.

Civil protection officials said they believed the ship was struck by a tornado over the water, known as a waterspout, and sank quickly.

Fifteen people escaped in a lifeboat and were rescued by a nearby sailboat. One body was recovered Monday ? that of the ship’s chef, Recaldo Thomas, of Antigua.

Thomas was born in Canada, according to his cousin David Isaac, but would visit his parents’ homeland of Antigua as a child, moving permanently to the tiny eastern Caribbean island in his early 20s.

Italian officials previously listed Antigua as the nationality of someone on board.

The fate of six missing passengers had driven the search effort, including Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter and associates who had successfully defended him in a recent US federal fraud trial.

Lynch’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.

Meanwhile, investigators from the Termini Imerese Public Prosecutor’s Office were acquiring evidence for their criminal investigation, which they opened immediately after the tragedy even though no formal suspects have been publicly identified.

Questions abound about what caused the superyacht, built in 2008 by Italian shipyard Perini Navi, to sink so quickly, when the nearby Sir Robert Baden Powell sailboat was largely spared and managed to rescue the survivors.

Was it merely the case of a freak waterspout that knocked the ship to its side and allowed water to pour in through open hatches?

What was the position of the keel, which on a large sailboat such as the Bayesian might have been retractable, to allow it to enter shallower ports?

“There’s a lot of uncertainty as to whether it had a lifting keel and whether it might have been up,” Jean-Baptiste Souppez, a fellow of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects said.

“But if it had, then that would reduce the amount of stability that the vessel had, and therefore made it easier for it to roll over on its side,” he said in an interview.

The captain of the Sir Robert Baden Powell sailboat, which came to the Bayesian’s rescue, said his craft had sustained minimal damage. The frame of a sun awning broke even with winds that he estimated reached 12 on the Beaufort wind scale, which is the highest, hurricane-strength force on the scale.

He said he had remained anchored with his engines running to try to maintain the ship’s position as the storm, which was forecast, rolled in.

“Another possibility is to heave anchor before the storm and to run downwind at open sea,” Karsten Bornersaid in a text message.

But he said that might not have been a viable option for the Bayesian, given its trademark 75-meter (246-foot) tall mast.

“If there was a stability problem, caused by the extremely tall mast, it would not have been better at open sea,” he said.

Yachts like the Bayesian are required to have watertight, sub-compartments that are specifically designed to prevent a rapid, catastrophic sinking even when some parts fill with water.

“So for the vessel to sink, especially this fast, you are really looking at taking water on board very quickly, but also in a number of locations along the length of the vessel, which again indicates that it might have been rolled over on its side,” Souppez said.

Italian coast guard and fire rescue divers continued the underwater search in dangerous conditions.

Because of the wreck’s depth, which requires special precautions, divers working in tag teams could only spend about 12 minutes at a time searching.

- With AP