Horror CCTV captures final moments of superyacht before it sank off coast of Italian island Sicily

Horrifying new CCTV has captured the final moments of a $59 million superyacht that sank with 22 people on board when it was struck by a tornado-like storm.

Disturbing CCTV footage has captured the moment a $59 million superyacht was engulfed by a tornado-like waterspout that would eventually sink it “in just 60 seconds”.

In one surveillance video, the lights of the doomed luxury sailing yacht slowly disappear as it is swallowed by heavy rain just off the coast of the Italian island of Sicily.

It’s understood another clip, captured by the cameras of a villa just 200 metres from the boat but not yet released, captures the exact moment it sinks with 22 passengers on board.

“In just sixty seconds you can see the ship disappear,” the owner of the villa told Italian news agency ANSA.

“Of about twenty cameras installed in the house, only one was not disturbed by the wind and rain. You can clearly see what is happening.

“There was nothing that could be done for the boat. It disappeared in a very short time.”

The 56-metre British-flagged sailing yacht Bayesian was anchored roughly 700 metres from port with 10 crew and 12 passengers on board when it was struck before dawn on Monday.

“At around 4:00am, all hell broke loose,” local fisherman Giovanni Lococco told AFP on Tuesday as he surveyed rescuers searching for six people missing.

Disturbing new CCTV has captured the moment a 56-metre superyacht was swallowed by a tornado-like waterspout

The CCTV was taken from a nearby villa and shows the lights of the doomed superyacht slowly disappearing

“In just sixty seconds you can see the ship disappear,” the owner of the villa said

Divers continue search for six missing people

Specialist divers spent a second day on Tuesday searching for six people believed trapped 50 metres below the surface, including a British tech tycoon and his teenage daughter.

Fifteen people, including a mother and her one-year-old baby, were rescued but the body of one man - believed to be the yacht’s chef - was found.

Divers have opened a hole in the hull of the yacht to get in through another direction, but furniture has made it impossible to move through the inside of the boat and reach the cabins.

As time runs out, the brave search and rescue workers only have 10 minutes working in the water at a time.

Divers continued their search for the six missing people who were on board the superyacht that sank off the coast of Sicily. Picture: AFP

Haunting final post of missing lawyer

The passengers were guests of Lynch - a renowned tech entrepreneur and investor sometimes referred to as the UK’s answer to Bill Gates - celebrating his recent acquittal in a massive US fraud case.

Lynch, 59, was acquitted on all charges in a San Francisco court in early June after he was accused of an $11 billion fraud linked to the sale of his software firm Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard.

Lynch’s wife Angela Bacares was among 15 people rescued, but the businessman and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah are missing, according to Salvo Cocina, head of the Civil Protection Agency in Sicily.

The chair of Morgan Stanley International, Jonathan Bloomer, who testified for Lynch in the US case, was also missing alongside his wife, Judy, the UK insurer Hiscox said on Tuesday.

Bloomer is also the chair of Hiscox, which issued a statement saying it was “deeply shocked and saddened” by the incident.

Christopher Morvillo, a partner at law firm Clifford Chance, who represented Lynch, was also on the boat along with his jewellery designer wife Neda, media reports said.

In an eerie final post on LinkedIn before the tragedy, Morvillo, 59, thanked his legal team for their work on the fraud case before dedicating a paragraph to his family.

At the end of hte post, he wrote: “And, finally, a huge thank you to my patient and incredible wife, Neda Morvillo, and my two strong, brilliant, and beautiful daughters, Sabrina Morvillo and Sophia Morvillo.”

“None of this would have been possible without your love and support. I am so glad to be home. And they all lived happily ever after….”

High-end jewellery designer Neda Morvillo is one of the six missing people. Picture: Neda Nassiri Fine Jewelry

Her husband, a partner at Clifford Chance law firm, is also missing.

Rescue mission ‘very complicated’

Mr Cari told Italian news agency ANSA the rescue mission was “very complicated”.

“Inside the sailing ship the spaces are very small and if you encounter an obstacle it is very complicated to advance, and it is also very difficult to find alternative routes,” he said.

He said divers had only been able to reach the bridge deck, which was “full of electrical cables”.

It’s understood that debris is blocking the divers’ access to cabins where the missing passengers may have been when the vessel went under.

“We have identified a glass window through which we could enter. But it is closed from the inside and is three centimetres thick, so we need to be able to remove it and then we can advance better inside,” Mr Cari added.

One diver told Italian media the superyacht was “practically intact” and lying on its side at the bottom of the ocean.

Grim development: “Still inside the boat”

Vincenzo Zagarola of the Italian Coastguard said it was likely the six missing bodies were trapped inside the yacht.

“We think they are still inside the boat, that is our very hard idea. Our search and rescue activity by sea and air has gone on for around 36 hours,” he told PA news agency.

“Of course, we do not exclude that they are not inside the boat, but we know the boat sank quickly.

“We suppose that the six people missing may not have had time to get out of the boat.”

Francesco Venuto, a spokesperson for Sicily’s civil protection agency, agreed.

“(We) think (the bodies) must be in there. We’ve been searching all day with helicopters and boats, we’ve found nothing. That wouldn’t make sense... in (these) conditions we should have found something by now,” he told the BBC.

The Italian coastguard said it was “difficult to imagine” a positive outcome given the time that had elapsed since the yacht sank.

“Given the time that has passed and the circumstances of the event, it is naturally difficult to imagine that things can go well but we are not giving up, so we are busy [searching for them] with naval and air resources,” Frigate Captain Vincenzo Zagarola told Italian media.

Local authorities made the grim admission they believe the missing passengers are “still inside the boat”. Firefighters are seen above with a bodybag after one person was confirmed dead early in the search. Picture: Igor Petyx / ANSA/ AFP

Billionaire British tech tycoon Mike Lynch is missing. Picture: Yui Mok/PA/AAP

An eerie image of the boat on Sunday night before it sank. Picture: Fabio La Bianca

Captain of nearby ship says water “way too hot”

The captain of a nearby ship that helped rescue passengers in the aftermath of the incident spoke to Reuters about the moment he noticed the superyacht had vanished

“I don’t absolutely know what they did. I only know that they went flat with a mast on the water and that they sank in two minutes,” he told the agency.

He said the abormally high sea temperature - 30C - was “way too hot for the Mediterranean, and this causes, for sure, heavy storms”.

‘Tight spaces’

Divers trained to work in tight spaces were flown in from Rome and Sardinia late Monday, but the search was made difficult by the fact the yacht remains largely intact.

Marco Tilotta, from the Palermo fire service divers’ unit, said some of the divers had worked on the wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship, which sank off Tuscany in 2012, killing 32 people.

Tilotta told AFP that search efforts were concentrated on getting inside the sleeping and living areas of the yacht, which was lying on its side in one piece.

The luxury vessel was moored off Porticello, east of Palermo, when violent winds and rains suddenly swept up the coast.

“It was terrible. The boat was hit by really strong wind and shortly after it went down,” survivor Charlotte Golunski told ANSA news agency.

Golunski, board director at Luminance, a company founded by Lynch, lost hold of her one-year-old daughter in the waves “for two seconds”, before managing to grab her “while the sea raged”.

“Lots of people were screaming” in the dark, said Golunski, who managed to get on a life raft.

The luxury $59 million superyacht (above) was struck by a mini-tornado. Picture: Perini Navi Press Office/EPA/AAP

Mast ‘snapped’

The Bayesian was built by the Italian shipbuilding firm Perini Navi in 2008, boasting a 75-metre mast, the tallest aluminium sailing mast in the world, according to the Charter World website.

A photograph posted on social media Monday by the Baia Santa Nicolicchia bar in Porticello showed the yacht all lit up, its towering mast shining in the darkness, just a few hours before the storm hit.

A waterspout is a column that descends from a cloud to form a rotating mixture of wind and water over a body of water, often during severe thunderstorms.

Karsten Borner, the captain of another yacht anchored nearby at the time of the storm, said there was a “very strong hurricane gust” and he had to battle to keep his vessel steady.

Borner saw the Bayesian’s mast “bend and then snap”, according to Italy’s Corriere della Sera daily.

Italian authorities have opened a probe into the incident, while the UK’s marine accident investigation branch is sending four inspectors to Palermo.

The boat is reported to be owned by Lynch’s family, and is named after the Bayesian statistical theory, which assesses the probability of something happening.

- With AFP