PALERMO (Aug 19): One man died and six people were missing, including British tech entrepreneur Mike Lynch, after a luxury yacht was struck by an unexpectedly violent storm and sank off Sicily early on Monday.

The British-flagged "Bayesian", a 56-metre-long (184-ft) sailboat, was carrying 22 people and was anchored just off shore near the port of Porticello when it was hit by ferocious weather, the Italian coast guard said in a statement.

Eyewitnesses said the yacht vanished quickly beneath the waves shortly before dawn. Fifteen people escaped before it went down, including a one-year-old child.

The names of the dead and missing were not immediately released, but a person familiar with the rescue operation confirmed that Lynch was not accounted for.

The Italian coast guard said the missing had British, American and Canadian nationalities.

"The wind was very strong. Bad weather was expected, but not of this magnitude," a coast guard official in the Sicilian capital Palermo told Reuters.

Storms and heavy rainfall have swept down Italy in recent days — with floods and landslides causing major damage in the north of the country — after weeks of scorching heat.

The captain of a nearby boat told Reuters that when the storm hit he had turned the engine on to keep control of the vessel and avoid a collision with the Bayesian.

"We managed to keep the ship in position and after the storm was over, we noticed that the ship behind us was gone," Karsten Borner told journalists. The other boat "went flat on the water, and then down," he added.

He said his crew then found some of the survivors on a life raft - including three who were seriously injured, and a baby girl and her mother - and took them on board before the coast guard picked them up.

Lynch, aged 59, is one of Britain's best-known tech entrepreneurs. He built the country's largest software firm, Autonomy, from his ground-breaking research at Cambridge University, and became known as Britain's Bill Gates.

He sold the firm to HP for US$11 billion (RM48.2 billion) in 2011, before the deal unravelled spectacularly following the acquisition, with the US tech giant accusing him of fraud.

Once lauded by academics, scientists and politicians, Lynch spent much of the last decade in court defending his name. He was acquitted by a jury in San Francisco in June, after he spent more than a year living effectively under house arrest.

He said at the time that he was "elated" to be cleared in the criminal trial in which he denied any wrongdoing and blamed HP for botching the integration of the two companies.

The coast guard said divers were inspecting the wreck of the Bayesian, which was lying at a depth of 49 metres.

Prosecutors in the nearby town of Termini Imerese have opened an investigation to look into what had gone wrong.

The Bayesian was built by Italian shipbuilder Perini in 2008 and was last refitted in 2020. Its 75-metre mast is the tallest aluminium mast in the world, Perini said on its website.

The shipspotting.com website said the boat was owned by a firm called Revtom Limited. Lynch's wife Angela Bacares is named as the sole shareholder of the firm on company documents.

The yacht's name would resonate with Lynch because his PhD thesis and the software that made his fortune was based on Bayesian theory.

The ship won a string of awards for its design and can accommodate up to 12 guests in six suites and a crew of 10, according to online specialist yacht sites.

The boat left the Sicilian port of Milazzo on August 14 and was last tracked east of Palermo on Sunday evening, with a navigation status of "at anchor", according to vessel tracking app Vesselfinder.

A UK foreign ministry spokesperson said British officials were in contact with local authorities over the incident and were ready to provide consular support for Britons who were affected.

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