Italian investigators have seized electronic devices and personal equipment belonging to five divers who died inside a Vaavu Atoll cave in the Maldives, widening a culpable homicide manslaughter probe opened by prosecutors in Rome. The devices were taken after the bodies were recovered and may help explain what happened during the fatal dive on 14 May.
The Genoa Flying Squad took mobile phones, computers, tablets, USB drives and a hard drive belonging to the victims, after Stefano Vanin returned the equipment to Italy. Prosecutors have also asked for access to GoPro cameras, dive computers and other items recovered from the bodies by the Finnish team that brought the last of the missing divers out of the cave on 18 May.
Five divers — Monica Montefalcone, Giorgia Sommacal, Muriel Oddenino, Federico Gualtieri and Gianluca Benedetti — were reported missing after failing to surface from the dive. Benedetti’s body was recovered on 14 May, while rescue diver Staff Sergeant Mohamed Mahudhee of the Maldives National Defence Force died during the initial search for the missing group.
Three Finnish cave specialists, Sami Paakkarinen, Patrik Grönqvist and Jenni Westerlund, recovered the rest of the missing dive team on 18 May and over the next two days. The equipment now being held by investigators in Malé could provide information about depths, timings, gas usage and, potentially, video footage of the tragedy.
The current inquiry is focused on a basic but decisive question: whether the divers entered the cave voluntarily and then became trapped, or whether they were pushed toward danger by a current. One theory under review is that they deliberately entered the cave and mistook a dead-end tunnel for the exit. Another, proposed by Alfonso Bolognini, is that currents near the entrance created a Venturi effect that the divers could not swim against.
Paakkarinen, who helped recover the bodies, said he thought it unlikely the group had entered the cave by accident. “It’s a huge cave,” he said. “And besides, in the Maldives, the sun shines up to, I think, 100 metres deep. So at 60 metres it’s still daylight, and when you enter a cave, you know it because it gets dark. You don’t risk accidentally entering a cave. I can only comment based on my experience.”
The cave, which local reports referred to as Devana Kandu or Dhekunu Kandu, has become the center of an investigation that now stretches from the seabed to the forensic labs in Italy. The devices seized in Italy and the gear held in Malé are expected to be the clearest source of evidence on the divers’ route, their depth and gas use, and whether any camera captured the last moments before the team disappeared.
That is why the case has sharpened so quickly. The question is no longer only how five experienced divers vanished in one of the Maldives’ best-known cave sites, but whether the evidence inside their own equipment will show that the fatal decision was made before they ever reached the tunnel’s dead end.
