News Desk
The Ministry of Tourism has indefinitely suspended the operating licence of the safari yacht MV Duke of York following Thursday’s diving accident near Alimatha in Vaavu Atoll. Four Italian divers remain trapped inside an underwater cave system at around 60 metres depth. One body has been recovered.
President Dr Mohamed Muizzu visited military search and rescue teams on Friday to be briefed on the operation. He assured rescue teams and diving sector officials that the government would provide whatever resources were needed.
The body recovered so far is that of Gianluca Benedetti, 44, retrieved from a cave opening at 60 metres. The four others are believed to be deeper inside the cave structure.
The Ministry of Tourism said maintaining the Maldives as a safe destination is a collective responsibility and called for strict compliance with local laws. Recreational diving in the Maldives is capped at 30 metres. This group was diving at nearly double that depth. Presidential spokesperson Mohamed Hussain Shareef noted that the entrance to the first cave chamber alone drops to 58 metres, a depth that requires advanced technical diving certification, specialised gas mixtures and dedicated training. Authorities have opened a formal investigation into why the safari operators allowed a recreational group to dive beyond legal limits.
The MV Duke of York is a 12-room vessel built in 2010, registered to Abdul Muhsin Moosa, a former TVM executive, and operated by Island Cruises Private Limited, co-owned by Muhsin and Ibrahim Rashid.
On Friday, eight MNDF divers working in pairs managed to map out a preliminary layout of the cave and cleared two of its three interconnected chambers before deteriorating weather and decompression requirements forced them to stop. Winds of 25 to 30 miles per hour have reduced underwater visibility significantly. Teams plan to resume on Saturday, focusing on the third chamber. Two Italian diving experts are expected to arrive to assist, and the Italian government is coordinating with the Divers Alert Network on repatriation once the bodies are recovered.
Investigators are looking at three main possibilities for what went wrong. The rough surface weather may have stirred sediment inside the cave, reducing visibility to near zero and causing the divers to lose the exit. A second theory is that one diver became trapped or panicked, and the others exhausted their air trying to help. A third possibility is oxygen toxicity. At 58 to 60 metres on standard air mixtures, the risk is significant.
The five who went into the water were all connected to the University of Genoa. Monica Montefalcone was a professor of tropical marine ecology and scientific director of an island monitoring programme. Giorgia Sommacal was her daughter, a biomedical engineering graduate. Muriel Oddenino, 31, was a marine biologist and published researcher. Federico Gualtieri, 31, was a marine biology graduate and certified diving instructor. Benedetti, the only one recovered so far, had left a career in banking to move to the Maldives in 2017 and was working as boat operations manager on the Duke of York when he died.
