The final two bodies from a group of Italian divers have been recovered from an underwater cave network in the Maldives, authorities said.
Five Italian divers died last week in a scuba diving accident after entering a deepwater cave for an exploration mission, in what was the deadliest diving tragedy in the island's history.
The first body was recovered the same day and two more on Tuesday from a cave at a depth of 60m. Maldivian National Defense Force rescuer, Mohamed Mahudhy, also died from decompression complications over the weekend.
The Maldivian government said the remains of the last two divers, identified as Giorgia Sommacal, 22, and Muriel Oddenino, 31, had been recovered from the cave and brought to the surface.
Mahudhy’s death led to the suspension of the mission and prompted the Italian authorities to launch an international recovery effort.
The government on Monday said three Finnish diving experts, assisted by police and military personnel, located the bodies in the deepest section of the cave.
All the bodies have been moved to a mortuary in the capital Male, an official from the president’s office said.
The Italian diving group was led by Monica Montefalcone, 51, a University of Genoa professor and marine ecologist who was a regular diver in Maldivian waters in the Indian Ocean, and included her daughter Giorgia, biomedical engineering student Muriel Oddenino, research fellow Federico Gualtieri, and diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti.
The divers had entered a deepwater cave for exploration last week after being granted the necessary permit to research soft corals in the Devana Kandu site. The university, however, claimed 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”, according to Italian daily Corriere della Sera.
The group disappeared after entering the cave system located about 50m below the surface. In the Maldives, standard recreational diving is restricted to depths of 30m, with deeper dives requiring technical training and specialised gear.
Authorities said the coast guard was alerted around midday on Thursday, and later that evening rescuers recovered one body from nearly 60m underwater, significantly deeper than the divers were believed to have intended to reach.
Alfonso Bolognini, president of the Italian Society of Underwater and Hyperbaric Medicine, theorised that two things could have happened after the group was potentially sucked into the cave where they ran out of oxygen.
“Either everyone was sucked in or one was sucked in and the others attempted a rescue,” he told the Italian outlet Adnkronos.
Maldivian authorities are investigating multiple possible causes, including whether the group descended far deeper than expected.
The government said it had suspended the operating licence of the dive boat the Italian divers were using.
Mohamed Hussain Shareef, a spokesperson for the Maldives president's office, said the investigation would focus on whether those in charge of the fatal expedition "took the correct precautions".
"We believe that the retrieval of the bodies will itself reveal a lot, as far as that part of the investigation is concerned," he said. "But that doesn’t take from the fact that cave diving in itself is very, very dangerous.”
Meanwhile, prosecutors in Rome opened a culpable homicide investigation into the diving tragedy.
Carlo Sommacal told Repubblica that his wife “would never have put our daughter’s life at risk”.
He hailed his wife as being “among the best divers on the face of the earth". “If there really was a yellow alert, they would have dived first and something must have happened down there,” he said.
“Maybe one of them ran into trouble, maybe the oxygen tanks, I have no idea. But I’m ready to swear anything about Monica’s behaviour.”
