A local military diving veteran has laid bare the harrowing final moments of five Italian tourists who perished in the pitch-black depths of a notorious Maldives cave system, branding the catastrophic tragedy “an accident waiting to happen.”

Alarm bells were frantically raised on Thursday when the group—including a respected university professor and her 22-year-old daughter—failed to resurface after plunging to a perilous depth of 165ft (50m) to explore the Thinwana Kandu cave, ominously known to locals as the ‘Shark Cave.’

What followed was a desperate, multi-day underwater drama that culminated in horror. On Friday, the body of their local instructor, Gianluca Benedetti, was found floating in a narrow passageway at 197ft (60m). On Monday, a specialist international recovery team finally discovered the remaining four victims huddled together at the furthest, dead-end wall of the cave’s forbidden third chamber.

It marks one of the worst single diving disasters in the history of the Indian Ocean nation.

‘The Cave is Unforgiving’

“I have visited those caves countless times. There is no current. They swam into that third cave. They chose to go in there,” Shafraz Naeem, a former military diver for the Maldives National Defence Force, told the Daily Mail in an exclusive interview.

Despite his decades of elite under-water combat and rescue experience, the 50-year-old revealed he has deliberately never set foot inside the final chamber due to its lethal topography.

“The cave is unforgiving,” Mr Naeem warned. “It is enclosed, pitch-black, and you can only see where you shine your torch. If something goes wrong, you cannot just shoot up to the surface like you can in open water. You are trapped, restricted, and at that depth, it is just completely suicidal.”

“One possibility is the instructor intentionally swam away from the group. Maybe he was running out of air. The rest of the group died in that third chamber and Benedetti died in the passageway trying to get out.” — Maldives diving expert Shafraz Naeem

The structural nightmare of the cave system is divided into three distinct caverns connected only by suffocatingly tight, rocky fissures. While the entrance opens at 164ft—already vastly exceeding the Maldives’ strict legal recreational diving limit of 98ft (30m)—the third chamber descends into a high-risk technical abyss.

A Secondary Tragedy in the Deep

The treacherous conditions and rough surface weather initially crippled local rescue efforts. The mission took a further heartbreaking turn on Saturday when Sergeant Major Mohamed Mahudhee, a Maldivian coast guard rescue diver and close personal friend of Mr Naeem, suffered severe decompression sickness while attempting to locate the tourists. He was rushed to hospital but tragically died.

A grieving Mr Naeem is now demanding answers from government officials, questioning why his under-equipped friend was sent into a lethal technical environment. “He didn’t have the proper training or equipment,” Mr Naeem said bitterly. “Maybe a politician just wanted a badge.”

The four holidaymakers trapped alongside their instructor have been identified as Monica Montefalcone, an associate professor of marine ecology at the University of Genoa; her daughter, Giorgia Sommacal, 22; marine biologist Federico Gualtieri; and researcher Muriel Oddenino.

‘Cooked by the Nitrogen’ — The Science of Panic

According to Mr Naeem, the group broke every foundational rule of cave diving, suggesting a fatal cocktail of ill-preparation and over-confidence.

Crucially, no safety guidelines or “Ariadne’s threads”—mandatory ropes secured to cave walls to allow divers to navigate back to safety in total darkness—were found at the scene. Furthermore, the group descended into the technical depths using standard, single-tank recreational gear meant for shallow reefs.

“The body of the guide had a single air tank on him. Where was the backup? Where was the redundancy?” Mr Naeem questioned. “People who are not trained in cave diving, using that kind of basic equipment, tend to get hit hard by nitrogen narcosis. Then things spiral out of control instantly.”

At depths below 181ft (55m), standard compressed air rapidly becomes toxic, causing oxygen toxicity and nitrogen narcosis—a phenomenon that severely impairs human judgment, mimics severe drunkenness, and induces crippling anxiety.

Experts believe the group likely fell victim to a mass panic event. Dr Alfonso Bolognini, president of the Italian Society of Underwater and Hyperbaric Medicine, explained that an inadequate breathing mix at 50m can trigger a swift neurological crisis.

“Inside a cave at that depth, all it takes is a single problem or a panic attack,” Dr Bolognini said. “The frantic thrashing causes the silt on the cave floor to kick up, clouding the water and destroying visibility. In these cases, panic leads to fatal errors.”

As the tourists lost their bearings in the murky darkness, unable to find the exit hole without a guide rope, their oxygen supplies would have rapidly dwindled as they desperately clawed at the stone walls of the third chamber.

Rogue Operators and the ‘Shark Chase’

The tragedy has shone a harsh, unforgiving light on the Maldives’ booming luxury tourism industry, with allegations that rogue dive operators routinely flout the law to satisfy wealthy international thrill-seekers.

The Maldives is one of the few holiday destinations globally that outlaws commercial technical diving, meaning advanced gas-mixing equipment is virtually non-existent. Yet, local insiders claim vessels frequently slip beneath the legal 98ft threshold.

“The local talk is they must have planned this deep dive secretly,” Mr Naeem revealed, pointing the finger at local tour operator Albatros Top Boats, which operates two luxury vessels in the area.

“That operator is well known for doing these deep dives, breaking the rules. Everybody knows it, but the authorities do nothing. Local dive centres are appeasing tourists, taking them deeper just to see the treasure sharks. Many go to 131ft or 164ft. But this time, it was fatal.”

From Italy, lawyers representing Albatros Top Boat issued a strenuous denial, claiming the company had absolutely no knowledge of the unauthorized deep-sea excursion.

Attorney Orietta Stella told Italian daily Corriere della Sera that the excursion was supposed to be a standard scientific cruise focused on shallow-water coral sampling. “We would have never allowed it,” Ms Stella insisted, adding that the victims were highly experienced but had taken it upon themselves to dive deep using standard recreational gear.

The Recovery

The horrific task of bringing the bodies to the surface was ultimately left to a specialist three-man team of Finnish cave divers deployed by the Divers’ Alert Network Europe (DAN).

Using highly advanced, military-grade closed-circuit rebreathers—which scrub exhaled carbon dioxide and recycle breathing gas to allow for hours of underwater submersion—the team executed a grueling three-hour operation on Monday morning to pull the four Italians from the abyss.

While the Maldives National Defence Force continues its investigation, the luxury holiday paradise—a sprawling archipelago of 1,192 coral islands—remains reeling from a disaster that many in the tight-knit diving community say was entirely preventable.

The family of the victims have declined to comment.