The bodies of the four Italian divers who have been missing since Thursday have been located inside a Vaavu atoll cave, according to a statement posted to social media by the Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF)
Monica Montefalcone and her daughter Giorgia Sommacal, Muriel Oddenino and marine biology graduate Federico Gualtieri have been missing since Thursday, after failing to surface from a dive near Alimathaa Island.
According to the MNDF, the four divers were found in one of the deepest chambers of the cave.
‘The bodies of four missing divers has been located inside the Vaavu atoll cave on a joint search & recovery operation conducted by MNDF CG, @PoliceMv, & a team of experts arranged by the Italian Government. Further dives to be carried out in the coming days to recover the bodies.’
A statement posted to X reads:
The body of dive instructor and boat operations manager Gianluca Benedetti was recovered near a cave entrance at a depth of around 60m after the divers were initially reported missing, which sparked the search and rescue operation into the cave system.
A Maldivian rescue diver, Staff Sergeant Mohamed Mahudhee from the MNDF Coastguard dive team, died on Saturday while searching for the missing divers.
The discovery of the missing divers follows the deployment of a specialist cave rescue team from Finland, which included Sami Paakkarinen, Patrik Grönqvist, and Jenni Westerlund.
Paakkarinen and Grönqvist rose to international attention with the 2016 documentary Diving Into The Unknown, in which the two men mounted an operation to recover the bodies of two friends who had died inside the Plura cave system in Norway in 2014, after Norwegian recovery experts called off the search.
A statement from DAN Europe, which co-ordinated the deployment of the Finnish team said that the dive began at 8.30 CET and lasted around three hours.
The team was using closed-circuit rebreathers and high-performance DPVs to carry out the extended search, with fully redundant life-support equipment configurations.
According to a Facebook post by DAN Europe, the search team announced their finding by floating a ‘torn page from a logbook’ – possibly a wetnote-style dive slate – to the surface, reading ‘WE FOUND ALL FOUR’.
‘Today’s result is the outcome of extraordinary preparation, technical excellence, and exceptional teamwork, said Laura Marroni, CEO of DAN Europe.
‘We are deeply grateful to the specialists on site, who are operating with professionalism, discipline, and humanity in demanding environments.’
Mohamed Hossain Shareef, a Maldivian government spokesperson, told the BBC that he expects two of the bodies to be recovered on Tuesday (19 May) and the remaining two on Wednesday.
Speculation has been rife as to how the incident occurred, with newspapers and social media commentators around the world commenting on an endless series of misinformed possibilities.
It is hoped that their recovery will shed light on why this tragic incident occurred. The boat from which they were diving, Duke of York, has since had its license suspended pending the results of the ongoing investigation.
This is a breaking news story – please check back for updates…
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