Tragedy hits a boatload of spies and conspiracy theories pile up

The black clouds soon appeared and crept up on the sun-seeking lakeside revelers in northern Italy, interrupting early evening aperitivi and lakeside walks. A weather warning issued earlier in the day had failed to anticipate the violence of the storm breaking over the lake, with winds so extreme it sank a boat, killing four of the 23 passengers.

According to news reports, the incident at Lake Maggiore on Sunday was a freak tragedy that would normally have attracted fleeting attention.

But in the following days, the story took off in the Italian media when it emerged that 21 people on the boat were spies, or former spies — including 13 from Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, and eight Italian. Official statements that they had celebrated a birthday failed to quell the speculative frenzy over their activities.

Two of the dead belonged to Italian intelligence, according to a note from Italian intelligence, while Israel said another victim was a retired Mossad agent. The fourth victim, a Russian woman, was married to the skipper of the boat.

What, Italians wondered, were all those spies really doing on a Sunday afternoon as they cruised around on a rental boat called the “Good…uria” (an Italian term for fun)? The meeting was quickly labeled a “spy party” by various media outlets.

Some outlets speculated whether the Alpine boat trip had been an opportunity to exchange information. Was it a coincidence that the skipper was fluent in Bulgarian, as some have pointed out, and was married to a Russian, Anna Bozhkova? Had the spies scoured the lake for Russian magnates investing in the area, such as the Milan daily Corriere della Sera set Thursday?

The prosecutor investigating the incident, Massimo De Filippo, and his boss, the chief prosecutor Carlo Nocerino, said such questions were beyond the scope of their investigation, which is to determine what caused the boat to capsize and sink.

Carlo Carminati, 60, the skipper, is being investigated on suspicion of negligent homicide, causing a shipwreck and responsibility for injuring the surviving passengers. “We are not interested in what the passengers were doing,” Mr Nocerino said in an interview at his office in Busto Arsizio in Lombardy, the region that includes the part of the lake where the boat sank.

Mr Nocerino said he had asked the captain of the team trying to surface the boat to inform him immediately when it resurfaced so that he and Mr De Filippo would be first on board.

On Wednesday afternoon, the boat had been towed close to shore but remained submerged after several unsuccessful attempts to surface using balloons.

“I do not want to doubt that we have not fully pursued the investigation,” said Mr Nocerino. The boat and its contents would be seized and placed under judicial authority, he said.

The prosecutor acknowledged media speculation that the government could stop the investigation if documents or suitcases were found. “If we find suitcases, we’ll confiscate them,” Mr. Nocerino said dryly.

Adding to the intrigue, the surviving passengers appeared to have been chased out of the lake within hours of the accident. According to two Israeli defense officials, the Mossad sent a plane to return the Israeli survivors home and tried to prevent the publication of details about the incident in Israel. (The Israeli media did not report until Wednesday that the Israeli victim was a Mossad veteran.)

A statement from Italian intelligence identifying two of the victims, Claudio Alonzi, 62, and Tiziana Barnobi, 53, as members of Italian intelligence, said they had been in the area “to attend a convivial gathering for one of the group’s birthday. A spokeswoman for the Italian agency said she had nothing to add.

The Israeli intelligence services have not officially released the real name of the Mossad veteran. His funeral took place in Ashkelon, Israel, on Wednesday.

The Mossad issued a statement on Wednesday noting that “because of his service in the organization, it will not be possible to elaborate on him. The Mossad has lost a dear friend, a dedicated and professional worker who devoted his life to the security of the State of Israel for decades, even after his retirement.”

The former Mossad agent who died belonged to a unit responsible for covert dealings with foreign intelligence agencies, according to a former senior defense official, who requested not to be named when discussing sensitive relations between intelligence agencies.

Although he had retired from the Mossad, he continued to serve as a reservist for the organization, arriving in Italy with his colleagues as part of a collaborative relationship between the Israeli and Italian spy organizations, the former official added.

The Mossad and Italian intelligence are working together on issues of common concern, such as the war on terror, or gathering information on the Iranian nuclear project, he added.

None of the survivors had any ID on them when they gave statements about the accident to Italian military police officers on Sunday evening. They said they lost them when the boat capsized, prosecutors said.

Prosecutors also confirmed that the Italians told investigators they were employees of the presidency of the Council of Ministersa government department, while the Israelis said they were part of a government delegation.

Regardless of the uncertainties surrounding the case, one thing was certain: the unexpected violence of the storm on Lake Maggiore on Sunday evening.

The civil protection service for the Lombardy region had issued a code yellow – a warning – for the lake about possible thunderstorms that night. Although all the bulletins had warned of deteriorating conditions in the area, “such intense phenomena that night were considered unlikely,” said Paolo Valisa, a meteorologist with a local weather forecast. desk. “You can predict a thunderstorm, but so far we haven’t been able to predict its intensity, at least not in such a localized area.”

Nearby wind speed indicators on the lake indicated gusts between 42 and 60 kilometers per hour, but it could have been even higher where the boat got stuck due to a downburst, strong winds descending with cold air from a thunderstorm and spreading, he said.

Samuel Panetti and several friends had also been out on the lake with their boat on Sunday evening and were the first to rescue survivors from the Gooduria.

“The weather had been good all day,” he said, but when the storm hit, it rained so thick it was like navigating a cloud. “There was so much rain and hail, and the wind was throwing the boat from side to side,” he recalled.

He saw what he first thought was a group of seagulls in the middle of the lake, but as he got closer he saw that they were people from the sinking boat, “crying for help, like children.”

He and his friends helped some aboard their boat and threw “anything that floated” into the water for others to cling to. Some survivors managed to swim to shore.

The two female victims were trapped in the charter boat, which sank to a depth of about 50 feet. A third victim was found at the bottom of the lake, while another was recovered floating.

“It was terrifying to see all those people in the water – it was like a scene from a movie. I still find it hard to believe it was true,” he said. “If we hadn’t come along, I think they would all have died,” he said.

Paolo Mazzucchelli, the director of public transport at Lake Maggiore, said that at the time of the accident, “the wind speed had increased very quickly in a very short time” and that the storm was “localized and very intense”.

“They were in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he said.