An international operation has recovered the bodies of two Italian divers from a deep underwater cave yesterday, a government official said, five days after a group of five drowned in the Maldives’ worst diving disaster.
Chief government spokesman Mohamed Hussain Shareef said the two bodies were brought to the surface at Vaavu atoll, just south of the capital Male, where the group had dived on Thursday.
“The two bodies that were brought to the surface from a cave at a depth of 60m will now be transferred to Male,” Shareef said.
Two more bodies are yet to be recovered from the same cave and a plan was in place to bring them to the surface today, he said.
The body of one member of the dive party was recovered on Thursday. A Maldivian National Defence Force (MNDF) rescuer also died due to decompression complications on Saturday.
Italy initiated the international recovery effort after the death of MNDF diver Staff Sergeant Mohamed Mahudhy on Saturday forced local authorities to suspend the search.
Australia and Britain have also provided assistance. The four bodies were located on Monday.
Maldivian authorities are yet to identify the Italian victims.
Italy’s University of Genoa said they included a marine biology professor, Monica Montefalcone, her daughter Giorgia and two young researchers.
Italian daily Corriere della Sera quoted the university as saying that “the scuba diving activity during which the accident occurred was not part of the activities envisaged by the scientific mission, but was carried out in a personal capacity”.
It said requests submitted to the Maldivian authorities “were evidently made outside the scope of the mission authorised by the university”.
Montefalcone’s husband, Carlo Sommacal, disagreed with the university.
“The truth remains that my wife was certainly not irresponsible,” Sommacal told La Repubblica daily in Italy. “And she would never have put my daughter Giorgia, whom she surely loved more than anything else, in danger. Now I’m only interested in bringing them home.”
Sommacal said there were hundreds of graduate students writing theses on the Maldives using data they collected with Montefalcone, or that Montefalcone collected herself.
The Maldives does not permit tourists to dive deeper than 30m.
Maldivian authorities have suspended the operating licence of the dive boat the Italian divers were using pending an investigation.
Tourism is a key source of revenue for the low-lying Maldives, a nation of 1,192 small coral islands and atolls scattered some 800km across the equator in the Indian Ocean. Several fatalities have been reported in recent years, but diving and water sports-related accidents remain rare. — AFP
