The 56-metre sailing yacht “Bayesian” was anchored some 700 metres from port with 10 crew and 12 passengers on board when it was struck by a waterspout, a sort of mini tornado, before dawn on Monday.
Fifteen people, including a mother and her one-year-old baby, were rescued but the body of one man — reported to be the yacht’s chef — was found.
Among the six missing were UK tech entrepreneur and investor Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, and Jonathan Bloomer, the chair of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy.
The passengers were guests of Lynch — sometimes referred to as the UK’s answer to Bill Gates — celebrating his recent acquittal in a massive US fraud case.
Experts and Italy’s coastguard described the rapid sinking of the superyacht as an “extraordinary” event.
The search was made difficult by the fact the yacht remains largely intact, emergency services said.
The British-flagged boat is lying 50 metres below the surface, with specialist divers taking one minute to get down to the wreck, and another minute to get back.
They are restricted to 12 minutes in total each dive because of the water pressure, according to Luca Cari, spokesman for the fire service.
Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares was among those rescued, according to Salvo Cocina, head of Sicily’s Civil Protection Agency.
As well as Bloomer, who testified for Lynch in the US case, the missing included Lynch’s lawyer Christopher Morvillo, and his wife, according to law firm Clifford Chance.
Lynch, 59, was acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court in early June after he was accused of an $11 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
It emerged Tuesday that a co-defendant, former Autonomy executive Stephen Chamberlain, died after being hit by a car on Saturday in England.
Divers trained to work in tight spaces were flown in from Rome and Sardinia to help join the Sicilian search.
Marco Tilotta, from the Palermo fire service divers’ unit, said some of the team had worked on the wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which sank off Tuscany in 2012, killing 32 people.
Tilotta told AFP that search efforts were concentrated on getting inside the sleeping and living areas of the yacht, which was lying on its side in one piece.
A search of the bridge earlier Tuesday turned up nothing.
“The spaces inside the boat are very tight and if you encounter an obstacle it is very complicated to move forward, just as it is very difficult to find alternative routes,” said Cari, from the fire service.
The luxury vessel was moored off Porticello, east of Palermo, when violent winds and rains suddenly swept up the coast.
“It was terrible. The boat was hit by really strong wind, and shortly after it went down,” survivor Charlotte Golunski told ANSA news agency.
