Deep-sea divers with Italy’s firefighter corps resumed their search on Tuesday morning for six passengers — including a British software mogul and his daughter — who are missing after a yacht sank off the coast of Sicily the previous day.
There were 22 people on board the British-flagged Bayesian, a 180-foot sailing yacht, which was anchored offshore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by what eyewitnesses described as a waterspout, a small tornado on water, during a sudden and very violent storm.
Fifteen people managed to find safety on a raft and were rescued by the captain of a nearby sailing cruise ship.
The body of the ship’s cook was recovered on Monday, but several people are still unaccounted for, according to to Salvatore Cocina, an official with Sicily’s civil protection agency: Mike Lynch, a British technology entrepreneur, and his daughter Hannah; Jonathan Bloomer, chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife; and Christopher J. Morvillo, a lawyer at Clifford Chance, and his wife.
Mr. Lynch was acquitted of fraud in a trial in the United States in June, ending a high-profile, decadelong legal battle against accusations that he had defrauded Hewlett-Packard when he sold it his company, Autonomy, for $11 billion.
The news about Mr. Lynch came just days after Stephen Chamberlain, a former vice president of finance at Autonomy and Mr. Lynch’s co-defendant at his fraud trial, was fatally struck by a car on Saturday while out for a run, his lawyer, Gary S. Lincenberg, said in a statement.
Prosecutors in the city of Termini Imerese, just east of where the yacht went down, have been charged with opening a formal investigation into the sinking and determining what led to it. Reached by telephone, the chief prosecutor declined a request for comment.
The search for the missing passengers began on Monday but was suspended late at night. “Access limited to the bridge deck, with difficulty due to the presence of furnishings obstructing passage,” the Vigili del Fuoco, or firefighters’ corps, wrote on social media.
Divers resumed the search on Tuesday, even as helicopters and ships trawled the waters near the site, the firefighters’ corps said in a statement.
The ship was lying on its right side, at a depth of about 165 feet, meaning that divers, working in pairs, could stay underwater only for about 12 minutes at a time, said Luca Cari, the spokesman for the corps.
Divers were seeking a safe point of access to the cabins. In a statement, the firefighters said it was impossible to verify whether there were people inside the hull.
“Obviously everything fell and the space is very tight,” Mr. Cari said, adding that the divers were having to remove obstacles, like furnishings and electrical wiring, that were “completely blocking passages.”
Mr. Cari said that several of the divers had been present during the search and rescue operations on the Costa Concordia, a cruise liner that capsized just off the Tuscan island of Giglio in 2012, killing 32 people in what is considered one of the worst maritime disasters in modern Italian history.
“It’s like the Costa Concordia, but much smaller,” Mr. Cari said in a telephone interview, comparing the search operations. “In the Costa Concordia we came across many obstacles but we somehow were able to overcome them — here the obstacles block the passages and have to be removed.”
“This makes it more difficult,” he said.
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