Mohamed Junayd and Waruna Cudah Nimal Karunatilake
Updated ,first published
Male/Rome: The bodies of two Italian divers killed in a scuba diving accident in the Maldives have been recovered, as efforts continue to retrieve the remains of two others.
“Identities have not been confirmed yet, but we know that it’s a male and female body that has been recovered,” Mohamed Hussain Shareef, chief spokesperson at the Maldives president’s office, said.
Expert divers from Finland spotted the bodies on Monday (Malé time) deep inside an underwater cave in an atoll in the Maldives, four days after they were reported missing.
The bodies were inside the cave’s third and last chamber, “pretty much together”, Mohamed Hussain Shareef, chief spokesperson at the Maldives president’s office, Shareef said.
The two remaining bodies will be recovered on Wednesday, according to the government’s plan.
The body of a fifth Italian – a diving instructor – was found last week near the mouth of the cave.
“This marks an important milestone in an operation that remains technically demanding, emotionally challenging, and operationally complex,” the Divers’ Alert Network Europe, which deployed the three Finnish divers, said when the bodies were first located.
The non-profit network said on its website that the Finnish divers were technical and cave divers with international experience in search-and-recovery missions, including operations in “deep overhead environments, confined spaces and high-risk scenarios”.
They had to use advanced technical systems, including closed-circuit rebreathers, which recycle exhaled breathing gas and remove carbon dioxide through a chemical scrubber, to locate the bodies on Monday.
Maldivian authorities were investigating multiple possible factors behind the deaths of the five Italians, including whether they descended far deeper than expected, the government’s Shareef told Reuters.
The group, led by Monica Montefalcone, a University of Genoa professor and marine ecologist, was exploring a cave at a depth of about 50 metres in Vaavu Atoll on Thursday, according to Italy’s Foreign Ministry. The recreational diving limit in the Maldives is 30 metres.
The other victims have been identified as Montefalcone’s daughter, Giorgia Sommacal; marine biologist Federico Gualtieri; researcher Muriel Oddenino; and diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti.
It is the deadliest single incident in the country’s diving history.
Shareef said the government had granted the group the necessary permit to conduct research on soft corals at the Devana Kandu site.
“What we didn’t know was that it was cave diving,” he said. “Because, as divers will tell you and appreciate, it’s a very different discipline with its own sets of challenges and risks involved, and particularly at that depth, there are any number of things that could have gone wrong.”
Montefalcone’s husband, Carlo Sommacal, has said in interviews to Italian media that his wife would never have put her daughter or others at risk. He described her as “one of the best divers in the world” who had carried out about 5000 dives and was “always conscientious” and “never reckless”.
Shafraz Naeem, a Maldivian diving veteran who has explored the Devana Kandu cave system over 30 times on a deep-exploration permit and now consults with the country’s defence forces and police, said the entrance to the cave was about 55 metres deep. Light reached only the first chamber, and it was pitch dark after that.
Experts say that as a diver goes deeper, the pressure around them rises, which means each breath delivers more oxygen into the lungs and bloodstream, even if they are breathing normal air. If this exposure is too high or lasts too long, oxygen begins to over-stimulate the central nervous system and damage tissues.
“It is incredibly dangerous to conduct dives at these depths on compressed air,” Naeem said. “Theoretically, oxygen toxicity starts to occur on compressed air at about 55 metres. That is very risky and very dangerous. You never know when oxygen toxicity will hit you.”
But Riccardo Gambacorta, a former diving instructor of victim Oddenino, said he did not believe that the Italians died because of oxygen intoxication.
“My personal opinion is that an unexpected incident may have occurred underwater. They essentially did not anticipate a certain situation,” he said.
Highlighting the difficulties of diving at that depth, Mohamed Mahudhee, a member of the Maldivian National Defence Force who was taking part in the search, died on Saturday from decompression illness, prompting authorities to temporarily suspend the recovery effort, which has been taking place in rough weather and sea conditions.
He was buried with military honours in a funeral attended by President Mohamed Muizzu on Saturday night.
Reuters, AP
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