: 19 MAY 2026, TUESDAY, 19:31:14
Four Italian tourists, all experienced divers, and their instructor set out on a scuba excursion May 14 in the Maldives to explore a sea cave.
None of them survived the journey.
The body of instructor Gianluca Benedetti was recovered later that day from the mouth of a cave in the archipelagic country’s Vaavu Atoll. The four others—Monica Montefalcone and her daughter Giorgia Sommacal, Federico Gualtieri and Muriel Oddenino—were found inside the cave May 18, the culmination of a multi-agency search effort that was postponed May 15 by bad weather and temporarily suspended the next day after a Maldivian military diver died during the recovery mission.
The Maldives National Defense Force confirmed in a statement posted to X that the missing divers were located, with “further dives to be carried out in the coming days to recover the bodies.”
Meanwhile, an investigation is underway to determine what happened to the group, who dove 50 meters (roughly 164 feet) beneath the ocean’s surface—which is 20 meters further down than the recreational diving limit in the Maldives, while anything deeper than 40 meters requires specialized training and equipment.
“For recreational and commercial diving, by law, nobody is allowed to go further than 30 meters,” the Maldives government’s chief spokesperson Mohamed Hussain Shareef said May 18, “and unfortunately, this appears to have happened a lot deeper because even the cave’s mouth is almost 50 meters under.”
The group set out on the 118-foot Duke of York, operated by Italian tour operator Albatros Top Boat. The boat’s license has been suspended pending a “thorough investigation,” the Maldives Ministry of Tourism & Civil Aviation said in a May 17 statement, concluding, “All necessary action will be taken to ensure full accountability, and tourism businesses and service providers will continue to be held to the standards required of them.”
As Shareef told “Everything will be looked into.”
According to the Associated Press, an attorney for Albatros told Italy’s Corriere della Sera that the company “did not know” that the divers planned to exceed the 30-meter limit, and “would have never allowed it.”
Lawyer Orietta Stella also said, per the AP, that the group appeared to be using standard recreational diving equipment, rather than technical equipment more suitable for deep sea cave diving. She also noted that, while Albatros marketed the cruise, the company did not own the Duke of York or employ the crew.
E! News reached out to Albatros Top Boat for comment and has yet to hear back.
With the search for answers ongoing, here is what to know about the Maldives diving disaster, which Shareef called the country’s “biggest diving accident ever”:
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