Finnish divers could have solved the mystery surrounding the deaths five tourists in a ‘pitch black cave’ within the Maldives.
The experts have suggested that the group may need taken the fallacious tunnel as they left the cave complex.
Five Italians died during a dive into the 160 ft deep ‘shark cave’ within the Devana Kandu cave system last week.
The bodies of ecology professor Monica Montefalcone, her daughter Giorgia Sommacal, researcher Muriel Oddenino, and marine biologist Federico Gualtieri have now all been retrieved.
Join for all of the most recent stories
Start your day informed with Metro’s News Updates newsletter or get Breaking News alerts the moment it happens.
They were accompanied by diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti, whose body was found last week.
They were on a research trip soft corals but are uderstood to have gone on a personal dive on Thursday morning when the group is believed to have died around 160 ft deep.
They’d launched the expedition from the Duke of York yacht, which didn’t have a permit allowing dives of greater than 100ft.
In total, six people have been killed as a part of the cave dive, with Maldivian military rescue diver Mohamed Mahudhee dying from decompression illness on Saturday during a recovery mission.
The deaths have been called the worst diving incident within the history of the island nation and sparked a frenzy of questions on how events unfolded.
A team of Finnish experts has now suggested that the Italian researchers could have taken the fallacious tunnel on their way out of the cave.
The professional-divers, working for Dan Europe, discovered the Italians in a corridor with a dead end contained in the underwater complex, Italy’s La Repubblica each day reported.
‘There was no way out from there,’ the corporate’s CEO, Laura Marroni, was quoted by La Repubblica as saying.
Marroni revealed the main points of the cave complex and the way the doomed dive may need played out.
She told the newspaper that the cave system begins with a primary large, very shiny cavern with a sandy bottom.
At the top of that room is a badly lit corridor, but with good visibility from artificial lighting.
The passageway is sort of 30 metres long and three metres across, which ends up in a second chamber of the cave.
That second chamber is a big, round space with no natural light.
Nonetheless, between the corridor and the second chamber is a sandbank.
While it is straightforward to recover from the sandbank into the second chamber on the way in which in, while you turn around to go away, the bank almost looks like a wall.
That ‘wall’ then hides the corridor behind it, the paper said.
On the left of the sandbank is one other corridor – only just a few dozen metres long.
‘The divers’ bodies were all found inside, as in the event that they had mistaken it for the fitting one,’ La Repubblica reported.
In the event that they had taken that corridor by mistake, ‘then it might have been very difficult to return, especially with the limited air supply’, Marroni said.
The expert estimated that the Italians had about 10 minutes or less of air left.
She added: ”Realising that the trail is the fallacious one and having little air, perhaps after going backwards and forwards, is terrifying. Then you definately breathe quickly, and the air supply decreases.’
Monica’s husband and Giorgia’s dad, Carlo Sommacal, told Italian media his wife ‘was top-of-the-line divers on the earth’ and would never put his daughter in danger.
He said she had carried out about 5,000 dives and was ‘never reckless’.
The Italian tour operator that managed the diving trip has denied authorising or knowing in regards to the group’s deep dive, which exceeded local limits, its lawyer told Italian local publication Corriere della Sera.
An investigation is underway to ascertain the reason behind death.
One other theory being considered is that the divers were sucked right into a cave by a robust ‘freak’ current, often called the ‘Venturi effect’.
Get in contact with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
For more stories like this, check our news page.
MORE: Bodycams found on divers killed in Maldives could reveal final moments
MORE: Tributes to bus driver killed in confrontation on Battersea Bridge
MORE: Mosque shooters who killed three ‘livestreamed their attack’ after stealing guns