UK tech tycoon Mike Lynch's 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, who was the last unaccounted for after the family's luxury yacht sank, has been found, according to a source familiar with the situation. Initial reports indicated that divers discovered a body, but it was Reuters' source that confirmed it was Hannah's. This discovery brings the final death toll to seven in the sinking of the luxury yacht Bayesian, which went down off the Italian island before dawn on Monday. The bodies of Lynch, a renowned tech entrepreneur and investor, and four other passengers were found on Wednesday and Thursday. Emergency services had found the body of another man, believed to be the yacht's chef, shortly after it sank in a sudden storm. Lynch had invited friends and family onto the sailing boat to celebrate his recent acquittal in a massive US fraud case. However, as the 56-metre British-flagged yacht was anchored off Porticello, near Palermo, it was struck by a waterspout, similar to a mini-tornado, and sank within minutes. Italian authorities launched a "delicate" search operation involving specialist divers, boats from several emergency services, and helicopters.
Fifteen people were rescued from the ship, including Lynch's wife, who is believed to have been waiting in a Sicily hotel for news of her husband and daughter. The 18-year-old Hannah had just finished her end of school exams and had a place to study English literature at Oxford University, according to UK media reports. Friends of the teenager told The Times newspaper that she was kind and clever, as well as a staunch feminist. The bodies of Lynch's lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda, and Jonathan Bloomer, the chair of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy, were recovered on Wednesday. Morvillo's firm Clifford Chance paid tribute to the lawyer and his wife, saying all were "heartbroken at the tragic passing... and still coming to terms with this terrible loss". The Bloomer family described their "unimaginable grief", saying Jonathan and Judy had been together for five decades. "Our only comfort is that they are still together now," the family said.
Many questions remain about why the yacht sank so quickly when other boats nearby were unaffected. On Thursday, the head of the company which built the boat said the tragedy could have been avoided. "Everything that was done reveals a very long summation of errors," said Giovanni Costantino, head of the Italian Sea Group, which includes the Perini Navi company that built Bayesian in 2008. He told Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper that bad weather was forecast and all the passengers should have been gathered at a pre-arranged assembly point, with all the doors and hatches closed. "Instead, it took on water with the guests still in the cabin. They ended up in a trap, those poor people ended up like mice in a trap," he said. Lynch, 59, was acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court in June after he was accused of an $11-billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard. The Bayesian, owned by his family, boasted a 75-metre mast, the tallest aluminium sailing mast in the world, according to the Charter World website. Raising it would likely cost some 15 million euros and take "six to eight weeks", according to the salvage engineer who led the operation to recover the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which sank off Italy in 2012. To recover the yacht, the mast could be removed on the seabed but the boat would be lifted up whole using a giant crane and a team of 40 specialist divers, South African engineer Nick Sloane told the Repubblica daily.
