Hannah Lynch was getting ready for Oxford in the fall, having been accepted to study English literature after her A-levels. On Friday, the 18-year-old’s body was the last one recovered from the wreck of the Bayesian, the mega yacht sunk by a ‘cloudburst’, a mini tornado, one week ago off the coast of Ponticello, near Palermo in Sicily.
Now, the Italian prosecutors in Termini Imerese have announced they are officially investigating the yacht’s captain, James Cutfield, for manslaughter (“omicidio colposo plurimo” in Italian). Of the 22 people on board the yacht, seven died in the sinking, including UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch, Hannah’s father. The other were Lynch’s New York lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda; Jonathan Bloomer, president of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Anne Elizabeth; and Thomas Recaldo, the ship’s chef.
Cutfield, 51, is an experienced New Zealander who worked all his life on big boats. Until today he had been only considered only as a witness. However, now that he is being investigated, per the Italian law, does not mean that later formal charges will be pressed.
Prosecutors interrogated Cutfield for two hours on Sunday, marking his second round of questioning in the past week as part of the ongoing probe into the disaster.
Authorities questioned Cutfield about several key issues: whether the tender door — separating the tender room from the engine room — had been opened, the position of the keel, and the exact timing of the events. A keel is a retractable hull appendage which pivots out of a slot in the hull of a sailboat. In case of severe bad weather, all doors and hatches are supposed to be closed, and the sailboat’s stability is improved by lowering the keel and turning on the engines. During a storm, passengers are supposed to be all together, while on the Bayesian everyone was in their own staterooms for the night.
The Bayesian, a sumptuous, 56-meter-long Italian-built yacht with a huge mast, sank 500 meters off the coast in a very short time, a question of minutes according to witnesses who rushed to rescue the 15 people who managed to board a lifeboat – including the whole crew.
Authorities have also sought clarification on other points, including the communication between the captain and the crew member responsible for weather warnings, the condition of the ship, and the operation of the mechanism used to seal the ship’s doors.
More crew members may be investigated in the coming days. However, the investigation will require the recovery of the Bayesian, now lying – with an estimated 18,000 liters of fuel – on the bottom of the sea at a depth of about 50 meters.
Meanwhile the autopsies of the seven victims of the shipwreck are set to begin at the Palermo Polyclinic on Tuesday.
But there are other shadows on the whole tragedy. The group on board was said to be celebrating Lynch’s acquittal in a decade-long fraud investigation in the US, linked to the sale of his software company Autonomy to tech company HP in 2011 for $11 billion (€9.8 billion).
A San Francisco jury found Lynch not guilty of multiple fraud and conspiracy charges in June. But his co-defendant Stephen “Steve” Chamberlain, also acquitted, died two days before the shipwreck. He was hit by a car while running in Cambridgeshire, England. The driver of the car was confirmed to be a 49-year-old woman who, according to the police, “remained at the scene.” While Chamberlain’s death is not considered suspect, the coincidence is troubling.
