The remains of four Italian divers who died deep inside an underwater cave in the Maldives were repatriated early Saturday, with the four coffins arriving at Milan’s Malpensa Airport in the middle of the day.
The bodies were taken to a morgue, and autopsies were due to begin Monday. The divers — Monica Montefalcone, Giorgia Sommacal, Federico Gualtieri and Muriel Oddenino — were among five Italians who went missing May 14 while exploring a cave in Vaavu Atoll, a trip that ended in one of the country’s deadliest diving accidents in recent years. The body of their Italian instructor, Gianluca Benedetti, was recovered outside the cave that same day and had already been returned home.
Authorities said Saturday that two investigations had been opened: one into the deaths of the five divers and another into how Mohamed Mahudhee, a Maldivian military diver, died while on duty during the recovery effort. Maldivian President’s spokesman Mohamed Hussain Shareef called the operation “challenging,” and the mission drew in three Finnish expert deep and cave divers, along with specialists and equipment flown in from the U.K. and Australia, before the missing bodies were found on May 18 and recovered on May 20.
Officials said the four bodies were found “pretty much together” in the innermost chamber of the cave at a depth of around 60 meters, well below the 30-meter recreational diving limit in the Maldives. The cave entrance sits at nearly 164 feet, the deepest point drops to 230 feet, and the system runs some 656 feet into the reef through three chambers linked by narrow passages. Investigators believe the group lost its way and ended up in a dead end where they ran out of air, with each diver reportedly descending on a single 12-litre tank of nitrox.
That sequence has left the central question focused less on the recovery than on the dive itself. Authorities said the divers had a permit, but their proposal did not specify the exact location of the cave they were exploring, and at least two of the dead were not on the list of researchers that had been submitted. Investigators will now analyze the Italians’ dive computers to reconstruct their profiles and determine how the descent turned fatal in a site that is popular with visitors but far beyond the limits set by law.
