A deadly scuba diving incident off the coast of the Maldives last week has left five people dead, with recovery teams continuing the grim work of retrieving the remaining victims trapped in a deep underwater cave. On Tuesday, a team of specialized Finnish divers successfully pulled the bodies of two Italian divers from the third chamber of the infamous local site known as Shark Cave, capping a difficult two-hour retrieval operation, Maldivian government spokesperson Mohamed Hossain Shareef confirmed to the BBC.
The two recovered remains are now being transported to the Maldivian capital Male for formal identification. The tragedy unfolded last Thursday near Vaavu Atoll, when a group of divers entered the unapproved cave system, which reaches depths of up to 60 meters (197 feet). The first victim, Italian diving instructor and boat operations manager Gianluca Benedetti, was recovered shortly after the accident, according to local reports.
The disaster claimed a fifth life on Saturday, when a Maldivian rescue diver died during an initial search effort for the missing divers. On Monday, Finnish specialist divers located four of the missing divers in the cave chamber furthest from the entrance, clearing the way for Tuesday’s retrieval of two of the bodies. Recovery operations for the two still-trapped victims are scheduled to resume Wednesday, with local officials expressing cautious optimism that both will be recovered by the end of the day.
Investigators hope that full retrieval of all victims will help shed light on the exact sequence of events that led to the accident. The recovery operation has been classified as highly complex from the start, due to the cave’s extreme depth, tight interior corridors, and extremely poor visibility. The cave’s entrance already sits 47 meters below the surface, with its interconnected chambers ranging to even greater depths. Complicating matters further, weather conditions on the day of the accident were rough, with local authorities having already issued a yellow warning advising against activity for passenger boats and fishing vessels.
New details have also emerged about the dive team’s background: four of the Italian divers were affiliated with the University of Genoa, but institutional representatives told the BBC the university never authorized any deep-sea diving activity as part of the team’s research mission in the region. “Any requests submitted to the Maldivian authorities were evidently made outside the scope of the mission authorised by the University,” a university spokesperson said. Maldivian government officials confirmed the team held a permit to dive to a maximum depth of 50 meters, but never disclosed their plan to explore Shark Cave in their permit application.