5 Tourists Found Dead after Risky Scuba Dive in Maldives. The Youngest Was 20.
The five tourists died Thursday morning during a planned cave dive in Vaavu Atoll, about 64 kilometers south of Malé in the Maldives.
Four of them were tied to the University of Genoa’s marine biology department:
Monica Montefalcone, 55, an associate professor of ecology and marine biology.
Giorgia Sommacal, 20, Monica’s daughter and a student at the university.
Federico Gualtieri, 31, a recent marine biology graduate whose thesis focused on Maldivian atolls.
Muriel Oddenino, a research fellow from Turin.
The fifth was Gianluca Benedetti, operations manager and certified dive instructor aboard the liveaboard yacht Duke of York. He had been described as highly experienced.
They went 50 meters down into a cave system, beyond the standard recreational dive limit of around 40 meters. The site was under a yellow weather warning, with winds reaching 48 km/h and strong currents reported across the atoll.
They never resurfaced. By midday, the Duke of York crew reported them missing. The Maldives National Defence Force launched a search using aircraft, speedboats, and specialized technical divers. The operation was described as “very high risk.”
The first body was found inside the cave just after 6 p.m. All five were recovered from the same cave system by evening.
No official cause has been released. Diving experts have pointed to oxygen toxicity, nitrogen narcosis, gas mix failure, or disorientation in the confined cave. One expert told reporters that “something went wrong with the tanks,” given that all five died on the same dive.
Maldives police have opened a formal investigation. Italian authorities are cooperating, and Italy’s Foreign Ministry confirmed the deaths and is providing consular support to the families through its embassy in Sri Lanka. The University of Genoa issued a statement expressing “deepest condolences” for the loss of four of its own.
Until Thursday, the deadliest single tourist scuba incident on record was the 1973 Mount Gambier cave diving accident in Australia, where four recreational divers got lost in a flooded sinkhole called The Shaft and drowned after running out of air.
The next-deadliest known tourist scuba incidents, both in 2014, killed two divers each: one off Bali, where a Japanese tour group was caught in a sudden storm, and one in Norway’s Plura Cave, where two Finnish divers died at 130 meters’ depth.
The Maldives case has now surpassed all of them.
