A devastating scuba diving accident in the Maldives, one of the Indian Ocean’s most popular tropical tourist destinations, has left six people dead, marking the deadliest single diving incident in the nation’s modern history. Last Thursday, a group of five Italian divers entered the water at Vaavu Atoll, roughly 62 miles south of the capital city of Male, and never resurfaced as scheduled. Now, officials have confirmed to the BBC that a joint search team made up of elite Finnish and Maldivian rescue divers has located the remains of the four still-missing members of the group, trapped inside a narrow underwater cave 60 meters below the surface.
The fifth Italian diver’s body was recovered just hours after the group failed to return to their boat on Thursday. But the tragedy deepened on Saturday, when a Maldivian military Staff Sergeant Mohamed Mahdhee, a rescue diver part of the eight-person search team, went missing during the operation. When Mahdhee failed to surface with his teammates, they immediately conducted an emergency search and found him unconscious, and he could not be revived.
The recovered Italian victims include two researchers from the University of Genoa: marine science professor Monica Montefalcone, and research fellow Muriel Oddenino, who had traveled to the Maldives to conduct field work on how climate change is impacting coral reef biodiversity. Also killed were Montefalcone’s daughter, Giorgia Sommacal, a University of Genoa student, recent graduate Federico Gualtieri, and boat operations manager and lead diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti — the first victim whose body was retrieved after the accident.
At the time of the dive, local authorities had issued a yellow weather warning for the area, noting rough sea conditions that posed heightened risks for small vessels and divers. Mohamed Hossain Shareef, a spokesperson for the Maldivian government, confirmed that the research team held a valid scientific permit, active through the end of that week, that allowed diving to a maximum depth of 50 meters across multiple atolls, including Vaavu. The permit specifically approved their work studying coral, but did not mention any plan to explore the nearby cave, whose opening sits 47 meters below the ocean surface.
Irregularities have already emerged around the dive: only three of the five Italian divers were listed as research personnel on the permit, and Sommacal and Benedetti were not included in the approved mission. In a statement to the BBC, the University of Genoa clarified that it had never authorized any deep-sea diving activity as part of the team’s approved research mission. Officials at the university noted that any permit requests submitted to Maldivian authorities for the dive were made outside the bounds of the officially approved research mission, and that the fatal cave dive was undertaken by the group in a personal capacity, separate from their academic work. The university also expressed profound sorrow over the loss of life, extending its condolences to the families of all the deceased.
Recovery operations are set to unfold over the coming days, Shareef confirmed. Two of the four trapped bodies are scheduled to be brought to the surface on Tuesday, with the remaining two to be recovered the following day. The four located remains are trapped in the third and furthest chamber of the cave, requiring specialized additional dives to extract them safely. An official investigation is currently ongoing to determine the full sequence of events and root causes that led to the accident.