Porticello, Italy:

Divers searching for the last missing person after a superyacht sank off Sicily found a body on Friday, believed to be the teenage daughter of British technology magnate Mike Lynch, who also died.

With this discovery, which the Italian coast guard confirmed to AFP, the death toll from the sinking of the “Bayesian”, which sank off the Italian island before dawn on Monday, rises to seven.

The bodies of Lynch, a celebrated technology entrepreneur and investor, and four other passengers were found on Wednesday and Thursday. Only his 18-year-old daughter Hannah is still missing.

Rescue workers had found the body of another man, believed to be the yacht’s cook, just hours after it sank in a sudden storm.

Lynch had invited friends and family onto the sailboat to celebrate his recent acquittal in a massive US fraud trial.

But as the 56-metre-long British-flagged yacht was anchored off Porticello, near Palermo, it was hit by a waterspout that resembled a mini-tornado.

It sank within minutes.

The Italian authorities launched what they described as a “delicate” search operation involving specialised divers, boats from several rescue services and helicopters.

‘Inconsolable’

Fifteen people were rescued from the ship, including Lynch’s wife, who was presumably waiting for news of her husband and daughter in a hotel in Sicily.

18-year-old Hannah had just finished high school and received a place to study English literature at Oxford University, British media reported.

Friends of the teenager told The Times newspaper that she was kind and intelligent and was also a staunch feminist.

The bodies of Lynch’s lawyer Christopher Morvillo and his wife Neda, as well as Jonathan Bloomer, the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, and his wife Judy, were recovered on Wednesday.

Morvillo’s law firm Clifford Chance paid tribute to the lawyer and his wife, saying everyone was “heartbroken by the tragic passing … and is still trying to come to terms with this terrible loss.”

The Bloomer family described their “unimaginable grief” and said Jonathan and Judy had been together for five decades.

“Our only consolation is that they are still together now,” the family said.

The Lynch family has not yet made any public statements.

Many questions remain as to why the yacht sank so quickly while other boats nearby were unaffected.

The head of the company that built the boat said on Thursday the tragedy could have been avoided.

“Everything that has been done reveals a long list of errors,” said Giovanni Costantino, head of Italy’s Sea Group, which includes Perini Navi, the company that built Bayesian in 2008.

Bad weather forecast

He told Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera that bad weather had been forecast and all passengers were to gather at a pre-arranged assembly point with all doors and hatches closed.

“Instead, water came in while the guests were still in the cabin. They ended up in a trap, the poor people ended up like mice in a trap,” he said.

Lynch, 59, was acquitted of all charges by a San Francisco court in June after being accused of $11 billion in fraud related to the sale of his software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.

The Bayesian, which his family owns, had a 75-metre mast, the tallest aluminium sailing mast in the world, according to the website Charter World.

Salvaging the ship is expected to cost around 15 million euros and take “six to eight weeks,” according to the salvage engineer who led the salvage operation on the Costa Concordia cruise ship that sank off the coast of Italy in 2012.

To salvage the yacht, the mast on the seabed could be removed, but the boat could be lifted as a whole using a huge crane and a team of 40 specialized divers, South African engineer Nick Sloane told the daily newspaper Repubblica.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)