The wife of missing British billionaire tycoon Mike Lynch, Angela Bacares, has shared the harrowing details of the moments leading up to the sinking of their superyacht.
Bacares, 57, who is now in a wheelchair after injuring her feet on broken glass, is anxiously awaiting news of her husband and their daughter Hannah, 18, who are still unaccounted for.
Bacares recounted to Italian publication La Repubblica that she and Lynch were abruptly awakened around 4 a.m. on Monday by a sudden tilt of their £14 million superyacht. The vessel, which sank about 160 feet at 5 a.m. local time after its mast collapsed and it capsized, had six people still missing off the coast of Sicily.
As the yacht overturned, 22 terrified passengers, mostly British, screamed in panic. Bacares described feeling a slight tilt before the tragedy and said that when she stood up to investigate, the sound of shattering glass sparked widespread panic.
Among the missing are Jonathan Bloomer, 70, a top executive at Morgan Stanley, and two Americans. The search for the missing continued through the night and into the following day, after 15 people, including a one-year-old British girl, were rescued.
Severe weather played a role in the disaster, with torrential rain, strong winds, and waterspouts battering the Porticello port in Palermo. Witnesses reported a tornado severing the yacht’s mast, which is the second tallest in the world. The yacht had anchored when the storm hit, causing it to lose balance.
Divers located wreckage about 50 meters underwater and found the body of a man near the wreckage, tentatively identified as the boat's chef. The yacht was hosting a party to celebrate Lynch’s recent legal victory in the U.S. over fraud charges related to the £8.5 billion sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.
In an eerie twist, Lynch’s former colleague and co-defendant in the fraud trial, Stephen Chamberlain, passed away just days before the yacht incident. Karsten Borner, the captain of a rescue boat, witnessed the yacht sinking after a tornado struck the Sicilian coast. Local fisherman Pietro Asciutto also saw the yacht capsize and sink. Luca Mercalli, president of the Italian Meteorological Society, described the extreme weather conditions, which included funnel clouds and winds reaching up to 200 km/h.
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