Finnish divers working for Dan Europe found their bodies in a corridor with a dead end inside the cave complex, some 50 metres (165 feet) down in the Indian Ocean archipelago.
“The bodies were found together in an area of the cave. Based on the cave’s layout, they may have got lost,” the company’s CEO Laura Marroni told AFP.
The Italian divers included a marine biology professor with many years of experience, her daughter, two young researchers, and their Maldives-based guide.
The alarm was sounded last Thursday after they failed to return from a dive.
The cave, an underwater system which extends for hundreds of metres through multiple chambers and internal passages, begins with a first large, bright cavern with a sandy bottom.
That is where the guide’s body was found, in an earlier recovery operation by Maldivian authorities.
At the end of this cavern is a corridor, which is almost 30 metres long and three metres across, and which leads to a second chamber of the cave.
The corridor ends in a sandbank, which is easy to get over into a second chamber, but “which could limit visibility” when attempting to leave again, Marroni said.
“The divers, unable to find the exit corridor, found themselves in a corridor to the left of what would have been the exit, which, however, was a dead end,” she said.
The dead-end corridor is where the four other bodies were found.
