Manslaughter investigation considered into superyacht sinking

Italian prosecutors looking into offences of ‘shipwreck and multiple counts of culpable homicide against an unknown person’

A manslaughter investigation into the sinking of the Bayesian superyacht is being considered by Italian authorities, according to reports.
The prosecutor’s office of Termini Imerese is making inquiries into why the luxury yacht capsized off the coast of Porticello at about 5am on Monday, a source close to the prosecution team said.
The team, led by Ambrogio Cartosio, is looking into offences of “shipwreck and multiple counts of culpable homicide against an unknown person”, similar to manslaughter charges in the UK, according to Palermo Today.
The prosecutor’s office has announced a press conference for Saturday morning, with more details expected to be released then. It would not confirm the investigation to The Telegraph.
The body of Mike Lynch, the UK tech entrepreneur, was believed to be among five bodies initially recovered from the wreckage. 
A sixth body was discovered on Friday morning and is believed to be that of Hannah Lynch, Mr Lynch’s teenage daughter.
Fifteen of the 22 passengers and crew on board, including Angela Bacares, Mr Lynch’s wife, were rescued by emergency crews after the yacht suffered catastrophic damage during a storm.
The group had been invited on board to celebrate Mr Lynch’s court victory after he was acquitted of fraud in San Francisco earlier this summer.
Prosecutors are expected to investigate whether the yacht’s keel played a role in the sinking after divers found it partially deployed, prompting questions about the stability of the vessel at the time of the sinking.
They will also examine whether the crew failed to close access hatches.
Previous reports suggested that the sinking occurred in 60 seconds, giving the crew little time to respond.
Giovanni Costantino, the founder and chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, which owns the Perini Navi shipyard where the Bayesian was built, has defended the yacht’s construction and blamed human error for the disaster.
He claimed the crew of the doomed vessel had up to 16 minutes to avert disaster.
Mr Costantino told The Financial Times: “The torture lasted 16 minutes. It went down, not in one minute as some scientists have said. It went down in 16 minutes. You can see it from the charts, from the AIS [Automatic Identification System] tracking chart.
“The captain should have prepared the boat and put it in a state of alert and of safety, just like the boat [the Sir Robert Baden Powell] anchored 350 metres away, which was built in 1957 and handled the [weather] event brilliantly.”
Mr Costantino claimed the Bayesian was “one of the safest boats in the world” and was virtually “unsinkable”.
He told the Corriere della Sera newspaper: “The passengers reported something absurd, that the storm came unexpectedly, suddenly. That is not true. Everything was predictable.
“Ask yourself – why were none of the Porticello fishermen out that night? A fisherman checks the conditions and a ship doesn’t? The disturbance was completely readable on all the weather maps. It was impossible not to know.
“A Perini vessel survived Hurricane Katrina. You don’t think it could survive a tornado like this?”