The Dan Europe diving team is ready to dive into the waters of Alimathà , in the Vaavu atoll, in the Maldives , to attempt to recover the bodies of the four Italians who never returned to the surface after last Thursday's excursion into a cave 50 metres deep.
The team consists of three expert Finnish cave divers : Sami Paakkarinen, Jenni Westerlund, and Patrik Grönqvist. The bodies of Monica Montefalcone, her daughter Giorgia Sommacal, Muriel Oddenino, and Federico Gualtieri are in the cave. The bodies of the fifth victim, Gianluca Benedetti, were recovered on Friday.
This morning, the team held an operational briefing at 9:00 a.m. local time, and at 11:00 a.m. they set off by boat to reach the dive site. The weather looks excellent, but the water conditions will need to be assessed.
The cave divers will dive with a rebreather (a closed-circuit underwater breathing system), a Trimix mix (nitrogen, helium, oxygen) suitable for the depth, and underwater scooters.
Meanwhile, Mohamed Hussain Shareef, the spokesman for the President of the Maldives, clarified in an interview with Corriere della Sera that only "three of the five divers involved were mentioned as part of the search team."
Shareef shows a list that also includes other names, but not Gianluca Benedetti and Giorgia Sommacal, the professor's daughter.
The permit, valid from May 3rd to 17th, is confirmed for six different atolls, including Vaavu. The vessel, the Duke of York, and the equipment are correctly named. Although, Shareef notes, "we don't yet know what equipment they had during the dive." Furthermore, "this team's research, as confirmed by a February document, is taking place between 0 and 50 meters deep," and "we are still investigating how deep they reached. The cave entrance is at 47 meters."
Shareef emphasizes that they had "the necessary permits." As for the 30-meter limit, "it applies to recreational diving," while researchers can propose diving deeper, and "there is no second specific law in the Maldives that prevents it." In this case, "the main problem is that it was a cave dive, and their research proposal, as far as I know, didn't mention it. They specified the atolls, but not the specific dive sites," Shareef says.
(Unioneonline)