Mum recalls horror moment baby slipped from arms after superyacht capsized
A 36-year-old woman has spoken of the moment her baby girl slipped from her arms after the pair were tossed into the ocean from a luxury yacht.
A 36-year-old woman has spoken of the moment her baby girl slipped from her arms after the pair were tossed into the ocean from a luxury yacht.
Charlotte Golunski from the UK and her one-year-old daughter Sofia were among the 22 people aboard the Bayesian — a superyacht that sank off the coast of Italy after it capsized in the port of Porticello on Monday during a violent sunrise storm.
The mother said she held her little girl afloat “with all my strength, my arms stretched upwards to keep her from drowning”.
“It was all dark. In the water, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I screamed for help but all I could hear around me was the screams of others,” Ms Golunksi told Italian publication La Repubblica.
Ms Golunksi was addmitted to Di Cristina hospital in Palermo with her daughter.
She is a senior associate at Invoke Capital, the venture capital firm owned by British tech billionaire Mike Lynch.
The Oxford graduate was among guests on board the Bayesian to celebrate Mr Lynch’s acquittal in an $US11 billion ($A16 billion) fraud case in June.
Mr Lynch, 59 including his daughter Hannah, 18, are among the six people still missing, while the businessman’s wife Angela Bacares and Ms Golunksi’s husband James Emsilie, were among the 15 people rescued by a sailboat.
Speaking from her hospital bed, Ms Golunski told Sicilian publication, Giornale Di Sicilia, that for “two seconds” she lost her baby in the sea.
“Then I immediately held her again in the fury of the waves. I held her tightly, tightly to me, while the sea was raging. So many were screaming. Fortunately, the lifeboat inflated and 11 of us managed to get on it.”
She said she can “still hear her little girl crying in her ears” as they floated in the waves and their holiday sailing boat sank.
The mother said she was amazed that the child, who had just turned one, had emerged from the water unscathed.
She reportedly suffered “a graze on her chest that required a few stitches”, while her husband, who was taken to Civico hospital in Palermo, was treated for bruises to his limbs and chest.
The trio, who were due to be discharged from hospital on Monday afternoon, had been guests of her boss on his $27 million luxury ship.
“We left London in a group of nine or 10 with Sophia — all employees and collaborators of our software company. We were all guests of our boss, a good person, extraordinary, who they may not yet have saved,” Ms Golunski said, as reported by the New York Post.
One person has been confirmed dead and a search continues for six missing people, including Mr Lynch’s lawyer, Italian authorities said.
An expert team of divers have already been able to locate the vessel 48 metres below the water on the seabed.
Who is tech billionaire Mike Lynch
Originally from Suffolk in east England, Mike Lynch was a former adviser to two British prime ministers and once a star entrepreneur who seemed to represent a rare tech British success story.
The businessman has a fortune of £500 million ($965 million) according to the latest Sunday Times “Rich List”, and owes his fame to his software firm Autonomy which he sold to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion in 2011.
He founded the company in 1996 in Cambridge, where he earned his doctorate, and turned it into a leading British tech firm.
In 2012, according to his LinkedIn he founded Invoke Capital, “a very different type of technology investor”, his bio states.
But just one year after the mega-deal, HP reported a writedown of $8.8 billion — including more than $5 billion it attributed to inflated data from Autonomy — plunging Lynch into a decade-long fraud scandal.
Prosecutors accused him of taking part in a massive scheme as Autonomy’s chief executive to deceive HP by pumping up his company’s value before its sale.
Last year, Lynch was extradited from Britain to the US to stand trial, facing two decades in jail if convicted of the 17 charges and spending the year in house arrest.
But in June he was acquitted on all charges.
– with AFP
Qantas pilot named as crash victim
A Qantas pilot has been named as one of three victims who died in a horror mid-air crash in Sydney on Saturday.
Five injured in gas explosion at campground
Five people have been injured in a gas explosion at a campground in South Australia, with two of them in a serious condition.
Seaplane ditches into ocean at holiday hotspot
An investigation is underway after a seaplane carrying five people ditched into the ocean at a popular tourist hotspot.