The commander of the Bayesian, James Cutfield , had provided his reconstruction of those terrifying minutes at sea while the sailing ship sank, dragging seven bodies to a depth of 50 meters , to the investigators when he was questioned as a person informed of the facts ; as a person under investigation for negligent shipwreck and multiple manslaughter , however, he did not answer the questions of the prosecutor of Termini Imerese, Raffaele Cammarano. But he could not hold back from the emotion, bursting into tears .
He is now waiting for the release of a copy of his passport to leave Italy , since he is not obliged to remain at the disposal of the judicial authorities.
His lawyers, Giovanni Rizzuti and Aldo Mordiglia, explain that the commander "has availed himself of the right not to answer for two fundamental reasons: first because he is very tired ", then "because we were appointed yesterday and to articulate a complete, complete and correct defense line we need to acquire a series of data that we do not currently possess". Furthermore, "at the moment we do not know if there are other suspects", says lawyer Rizzuti.
In any case, further registrations will have to be formalized when the autopsy is assigned , to give the suspects the opportunity to nominate experts and consultants for the unrepeatable investigations . Among them could be the first officer Tijs Koopman and the sailor who was on watch the night of the shipwreck. And it is not excluded that assessments will also be made regarding the shipping company and the one that managed the vessel.
The magistrates are acquiring useful elements to clarify what happened that night of August 19 , when the 56-meter sailing vessel sank in a quarter of an hour while a violent whirlwind raged that the Dutch vessel Sir Robert Baden Powell, a few meters from the British yacht, managed to control and then went on to save the 15 people who fell into the sea: nine members of the crew and six passengers, including Angela Barcares, owner of the shipping company of the Bayesian, and wife of the tycoon Mike Lynch, who died together with his 18-year-old daughter Hannah.
Stephen Edwards, who commanded the Bayesian from 2015 to 2020, does not believe in the hypothesis that the hatch was left open, an error that would be attributable to the crew. For him, the hatch on the left side was "100% not open". The Bayesian, he is convinced, "went beyond its operational limits" .
That the yacht found itself at the center of an extraordinarily violent meteorological phenomenon, called a downburst, is confirmed by the Institute of Marine Sciences of the National Research Council (CNR-Ismar) based on the recording of a similar event that occurred in July 2008 in the upper Adriatic and measured by the oceanographic platform. The study, published in 2012, shows that following a storm, the wind went from a speed of 3 meters per second to a speed of 30 meters per second (equal to 108 kilometers per hour) in a few minutes, with gusts that for 15 minutes went well beyond the maximum detectable by the instrument (40 meters per second).
In parallel with the investigation by the Public Prosecutor's Office, another investigation is ongoing, equally delicate, that of monitoring the wreck with its load of 18 thousand liters of fuel at the bottom of the sea . The Coast Guard is conducting it. The divers are taking samples from the water column near the wreck, with the help of ROVs and the use of specific parametric probes for the qualitative analysis of the water, in collaboration with the personnel of Arpa Sicilia. And at the moment there are no leaks from the tanks. On this front, the company Camper & Nicholsons, "yacht management" of the Bayesian, emphasizes that it is not "involved in the operations of extracting the fuel" and "recovering the wreck" and that the "priority of the company is to support the survivors and provide assistance to the crew members to ensure their return home and to their families".
(Unioneonline/vl)
