The search for the bodies of four Italian scuba divers resumed Saturday in the Maldives after a rescue operation turned deadly and a Maldivian defence force member died from decompression sickness. Mohamed Mahudhee, who had been part of the divers briefing President Mohamed Muizzu on the plan at the search site on Friday, died in a hospital in Male after being transferred there.
The search was focused on a deep underwater cave in Vaavu Atoll, where five Italians died in a scuba diving accident on Thursday. The body of the fifth diver was found near the mouth of a cave shortly afterwards, while rescuers believed the other four were still inside the same cave. The recovery effort had already reached two of the cave’s three large chambers on Friday before authorities suspended operations because of bad weather. By Saturday, two Italian experts, including a deep-sea rescue expert and a cave diving expert, were expected to join the effort.
Mahudhee’s death underscored the danger facing rescuers working in a site that officials described as the worst single diving accident in the Maldives. Mohamed Hussain Shareef said, “The death goes to show the difficulty of the mission.” The Maldives, a chain of 1,192 tiny coral islands scattered across hundreds of miles of the Indian Ocean, depends heavily on the sea, but in this case the water became part of the toll.
Italy’s foreign ministry said the divers had “apparently died while attempting to explore caves at a depth of 50 metres (164ft).” Italy’s foreign minister Antonio Tajani said the government “will do everything possible to recover the bodies of our compatriots.” The deceased Italians were identified as Monica Montefalcone, Giorgia Sommacal, Federico Gualtieri, Muriel Oddenino and Gianluca Benedetti, and Benedetti’s body had already been recovered.
Two of the victims, Montefalcone and Oddenino, were on an official scientific mission to monitor marine environments and study the effects of the climate crisis on tropical biodiversity, according to the University of Genoa. Carlo Sommacal, speaking of his wife Giorgia, said, “Something must have happened,” and rejected the idea that she had been reckless. “Had two lives – one on land and one in her environment, the water,” he said of her life around the sea.
The recovery operation now rests on whether divers can move safely through a cave divided into three chambers and narrow passages after a delay caused by weather and a growing death toll. What began as a search for the missing has become a test of how much more risk rescuers can absorb before the mission itself is forced to stop.
