Azernews.Az

Expert divers on Tuesday recovered the bodies of two of the five Italians who died while scuba diving in a cave at a depth of around 60 metres in the Maldives last week, AzerNEWS reports, citing ANSA.

The recovered bodies were those of Federico Gualtieri and Monica Montefalcone, sources said.

The Maldivian authorities had previously said they would try to recover two more bodies, those of Montefalcone's daughter Giorgia Sommacal and Muriel Oddenino from the cave in a separate dive on Wednesday.

The body of a fifth member of the group, diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti, was recovered on the day of the disaster.

Three expert Finnish cave divers, Sami Paakkarinen, Jenni Westerlund and Patrik Grönqvist, from the Divers Alert Network (DAN) association, managed to locate the four bodies after they joined the search operation on Monday.

A rescue diver from the Maldivian National Defence Force died from decompression-related complications after a dive during the search on Saturday.

DAN Europe said Monday that the operation to recover the four bodies was "technically demanding, emotionally intense and operationally complex".

One of the issues that has been discussed since the disaster is whether all the members of the team had the necessary permits to do a dive at that depth in the area.

A government spokesperson said that "perhaps not all permits were valid".

Four of the victims were linked to the University of Genoa.

Montefalcone was an ecology professor with it, Sommacal was one of its biomedical engineering students, Oddenino was a researcher with its Earth, environment and life science department, and Benedetti had recently completed a masters degree in marine biology and ecology.