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Five Italian nationals who died while scuba diving in the Maldives may have become lost while exploring an underwater cave, the CEO of the company that recovered their bodies said on Thursday.
The four remaining bodies were reportedly found earlier this week by a team of Finnish divers working for Dan Europe.
The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs previously said that the divers had gone missing while “attempting to explore caves at a depth of 50 metres.”
An early reconstruction of events showed the cave the divers entered was divided into “three large chambers connected by narrow passages,” the ministry said.
Initial rescue operations exploring two of the three chambers were made difficult by the depth of the search area, meaning longer dives were not possible “due to the lack of oxygen for decompression,” it added.
“There was no way out from there,” Dan Europe executive Laura Marroni said, per Italian newspaper la Repubblica.
Marroni told the outlet that the divers had discovered that the cave, which is near the small island of Alimatha, began with a large, brightly-lit cavern.
An almost-30 metre long corridor then led away from that room where “visibility, using artificial lighting, was excellent,” she continued. From there, a sandbank separates the corridor from a second large chamber with no natural light.
The report said it would have been easy to get past the sandbank into this second room but that the bank appears to hide the corridor when you turn back.
The divers’ bodies were all found in a separate, shorter corridor to the left of the sandbank, per the report.
“It would have been very difficult to return, especially with the limited air supply”, Marroni said, adding that they likely had “about 10 minutes, maybe even less.”
Sergeant Major Mohammed Mahdi, a rescuer from the Maldives National Defence Force, also died while carrying out a search for the bodies.
Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani offered his condolences to his Maldivian counterpart over the news.
“These days of grief for Italy are exacerbated by the news that one of your brave military, Sergeant Major Mohammed Mahdi, has died while attempting to recover the bodies of our fellow Italians,” Tajani said.
“This tragedy unites Italy and the Maldives in grief and respect for the victims,” he added.