On 19 August 2024, seven people lost their lives in the mysterious shipwreck of the Bayesian yacht off the coast of Porticello, near Palermo.

Among them was Mike Lynch, the owner of Darktrace, a company that collaborated with numerous secret services.

Close to the same time, Stephen Chamberlain – the company’s chief operating officer — died after being struck by a car while out jogging in Cambridgeshire.

Last night, during Quarta Repubblica, a talk show on Italian TV network Rete 4, it was revealed that the site of the accident had been combed by British agents before Italian divers had access to it.

‘From what I have been able to gather from confidential sources close to those investigating the case,’ said Federico Carbone, criminologist, forensic analyst and expert at the Palermo court, others arrived before our divers.

The foreign soldiers would have arrived ‘in the hours immediately following’ the shipwreck, ‘within 24 hours’, and were most likely looking for data relating to Lynch’s activity with the cybersecurity company Darktrace.’

Extremely sensitive data. Lynch worked for several international intelligence services, including the Israelis, MI6 and the CIA.

The suspicions, according to the sources quoted by the forensic expert, would point to the British secret services because ‘their military boats were spotted near the site.’

The pre-emptive action was reportedly unauthorized by Italian authorities, but they turned a blind eye to it, and saw the removal of computers, hard drives and encrypted devices from the vessel.

Darktrace started working with GCHQ and MI5 very early on. Lynch’s very first company, Cambridge Neurodynamics, had done work for the British intelligence agencies, as Lynch told WIRED in 2002.

Darktrace has long been engaged in the cyber dimension of the war in Ukraine. In particular, we are talking about the Prevent-Ot project launched in 2015.

It is perhaps no coincidence that in the week following the outbreak of the conflict, between 24 February and 3 March 2022, the value of the company’s shares, which was still headed by Lynch, grew by 40 per cent. Darktrace may have also assisted Kiev’s attack on the Kursk region. TELL US WHAT YOU THINK

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