Maldives National Defense Force military divers prepare to enter the water on Saturday amid a search for four Italian divers missing off the Vaavu Atoll. Staff Sergeant Mohammed Mahdi (2-L) was killed later the same day after sustaining decompression injuries, bringing the total death toll in the incident to six. Photo by Maldives President’s Media Division/EPA
May 18 (UPI) — Maldivian authorities said Monday the bodies of four Italians killed while diving in underwater caves in the Vaavu Atoll area of the Indian Ocean archipelago had been found and an attempt to recover them would be made in the coming days.
The international operation involving the coast guard and expert Finnish and Maldivian dive teams discovered the Italian nationals, faculty and students from the University of Genoa on a research expedition, in a cave at a depth of more than 200 feet.
Maldivian government spokesperson Mohamed Hossain Shareef said three Finnish divers from the Divers Alert Network, a global scuba safety group, joined a fourth expert and the local coastguard at the scene to figure out how best to proceed.
Specialist equipment provided by the United Kingdom and Australia was being used to aid in the task of finding and recovering the divers’ remains from what was described as a labyrinthine cave system.
“Further dives [are] to be carried out in the coming days to recover the bodies,” Maldivian government spokesperson Mohamed Hossain Shareef told the BBC.
He said the operation would be conducted in two phases, with the rescue team planning to recover two bodies on Tuesday and two on Wednesday, noting that the bodies were in the deepest section of the cave system, at a depth of 230 feet.
The body of a fifth member of the group, believed to be the dive boat manager and diving instructor for the expedition, Gianluca Benedetti, also an Italian national, was found in the same location on the day of the accident on Thursday.
The weather in the area was poor at the time the divers went missing, with rough sea conditions, along with the death of a Maldives National Defense Force diver on Saturday, hampering the recovery operation.
Shareef said the Italian group had applied for and been granted permission for a research mission to study coral, which would include dives to depths below those normally undertaken, but did not say exploring caves formed part of the plan.
Shareef previously stated that recreational scuba divers were only permitted to dive up to a depth of around 100 feet and it was unclear why Italians entered a cave twice as far below the surface.
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