Italian prosecutors have positioned below investigation the captain of the superyacht that sank off Sicily final week in a storm, killing British tech magnate Mike Lynch and 6 different folks, a judicial supply mentioned on Monday.
James Cutfield, a 51-year-old New Zealand nationwide, is being investigated for manslaughter and shipwreck, the supply mentioned, confirming earlier experiences by Italian media.
Being positioned below investigation in Italy doesn’t indicate guilt and doesn’t imply formal costs will essentially observe. Notices to folks below investigation must be despatched out earlier than authorities can perform the autopsies on the our bodies of the lifeless.
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The choice was made after Cutfield was interrogated for a second time. Reuters has been unable to contact Cutfield.
It’s nonetheless unclear whether or not different members of the crew or different folks can even be put below investigation together with the captain.
The British-flagged Bayesian, a 56-meter-long (184-foot) yacht, was carrying 22 folks when it capsized and sank on Monday inside minutes of being hit by a pre-dawn storm whereas anchored off northern Sicily.
Fifteen folks survived, together with Lynch’s spouse, whose firm owned the Bayesian. Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, was amongst those that died.
Whereas the yacht had been hit by a sudden meteorological occasion, it was believable that crimes of a number of manslaughter and inflicting a shipwreck by means of negligence had been dedicated, the pinnacle of the general public prosecutor’s workplace of Termini Imerese, Ambrogio Cartosio, mentioned on Saturday.
Maritime regulation offers a captain full accountability for the ship, crew, and all on board.
Cutfield and his eight surviving crew members have made no public remark but on the catastrophe.
“The Bayesian was constructed to go to sea in any climate,” Franco Romani, a nautical architect who was a part of the crew that designed it instructed each day La Stampa in an interview printed on Monday.
He mentioned the yacht might have taken on water from a facet hatch that was left open.
(Reporting by Giulia Segreti and Giselda Vagnoni in Rome and Wladimiro Pantaleone in Palermo; enhancing by Bernadette Baum and Angus MacSwan)
{Photograph}: Italian Firefighters scuba divers carry ashore in a inexperienced bag the physique of one of many victims of the UK flagged vessel Bayesian, on Wednesday, Aug. 21, 2024. (AP Photograph/Salvatore Cavalli)
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