Five Italian nationals who died while scuba diving in the Maldives likely became disoriented and lost their exit route in an underwater cave system, according to the CEO of the company that recovered their bodies. The incident, which unfolded near the small island of Alimatha, has drawn attention to the dangers of cave diving at extreme depths.
The Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs had previously stated that the divers went missing while “attempting to explore caves at a depth of 50 metres.” An early reconstruction of events described the cave as divided into “three large chambers connected by narrow passages.”
Narrow Passages and Limited Air
Dan Europe, the organisation that coordinated the recovery, reported that a team of Finnish divers found the four remaining bodies earlier this week. The fifth body had been recovered earlier. Dan Europe executive Laura Marroni told Italian newspaper la Repubblica that the cave began with a large, brightly lit cavern. An almost 30-metre-long corridor led away from that room, where “visibility, using artificial lighting, was excellent,” she said.
From there, a sandbank separates the corridor from a second large chamber with no natural light. Marroni explained that it would have been easy to get past the sandbank into this second room, but the bank appears to hide the corridor when you turn back. “There was no way out from there,” she said.
The divers’ bodies were all found in a separate, shorter corridor to the left of the sandbank. “It would have been very difficult to return, especially with the limited air supply,” Marroni added, estimating they likely had “about 10 minutes, maybe even less.”
Initial rescue operations exploring two of the three chambers were hampered by the depth of the search area, which made longer dives impossible “due to the lack of oxygen for decompression,” the Italian ministry noted.
Loss of a Rescuer
Sergeant Major Mohammed Mahdi, a rescuer from the Maldives National Defence Force, also died while carrying out the search for the bodies. Italy’s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani offered his condolences to his Maldivian counterpart over the news.
The tragedy has prompted renewed scrutiny of cave diving safety in the Maldives, a popular destination for European tourists. The incident follows a previous recovery of two bodies from the same cave system. For a broader look at the risks, see our earlier coverage of the fatal accident and the search for the missing divers.
