Crew member on watch duty on Mike Lynch’s yacht says he was ‘walking on the walls’ of the boat as he tried to save passengers
Divers on a boat during the search and rescue operation for the “Bayesian” yacht.
A crew member who was on board British tech tycoon Mike Lynch’s “Bayesian” yacht when it sank off the coast of Porticello, Sicily, this month has opened up about the incident.
Matthew Griffiths, a British sailor who was on watch duty on the vessel when it sank, told prosecutors that he had awoken the yacht’s captain as “the wind was blowing at 20 knots,” Italian news agency ANSA reported.
He said the captain then “ordered to wake everyone else up” before Griffiths “stored away the pillows and plants, closed the windows of the sitting room on the bow and some hatches.”
After being thrown from the tilting ship into the water once, Griffiths said he climbed back on board and was “walking on the walls” as he and other crew members attempted to save those they could.
Griffiths, the boat’s captain James Cutfield, and the yacht’s engineer Tim Parker Eaton are under investigation following the sinking.
Ansa reported that the attorneys of Griffiths and Parker Eaton may request “technical consultancies to clarify the causes of the shipwreck.”
The head of the public prosecutor’s office of Termini Imerese, Ambrogio Cartosio, previously said he was investigating a “crime hypothesis” of culpable shipwreck and manslaughter.
Experts have said the state-of-the-art yacht should not have sunk so easily.
Seven people died after the Bayesian went down.
Among the victims were Mike Lynch and his 18-year-old daughter, Hannah.
Speaking of the survivors, Griffiths said that “Cutfield rescued the little girl and her mother,” referring to Charlotte Golunski and her one-year-old daughter.
Mike Lynch, the founder of Autonomy, was on the yacht with friends and family celebrating his recent acquittal in a fraud trial.
Stephen Chamberlain, a former vice president of finance at Autonomy who was also a defendant in the fraud trial, died in a separate incident days before the Bayesian sank.
