5 dead in scuba diving accident in deep underwater cave in the Maldives: Officials
Boat off the Dhigurah island coastline with its long white sand beach lined with palm trees in the Maldives (@Didier Marti/Getty Images)
(MALDIVES) Five Italian nationals, including a mother and her daughter, died while scuba diving in a deep underwater cave in the Maldives, according to Italian and Maldivian officials, as a risky search effort attempts to recover the remaining missing divers.
The body of one of the divers has since been recovered in a cave about 200 feet deep, authorities said. The remaining four divers are believed to be inside the 200-foot-long cave, according to the Maldives National Defense Force.
Additional divers and special equipment were being sent to the area Friday for the “very dangerous, high-risk operation,” it said. The search was suspended Friday due to bad weather and the recovery operation is expected to resume on Saturday, The Associated Press reported.
Maldivian presidential spokesperson Mohamed Hussain Shareef extended his “deepest condolences” to the people of Italy following the “tragic diving incident” in a statement on Friday. He said the search for the four remaining divers “remains our highest priority.”
Italy’s Foreign Ministry said the five Italian nationals died in a scuba diving accident. They were reported to have died “while attempting to explore caves at a depth of 50 meters,” it said.
“The reconstruction of the incident is still underway by the Maldivian authorities,” the ministry said.
The Italian National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology and the University of Genoa (UniGe) identified the deceased divers as Monica Montefalcone, a marine scientist and associate professor at UniGe; her daughter, Giorgia Sommacal, a UniGe biomedical engineering student; Muriel Oddenino, a UniGe research fellow; and marine biologist Federico Gualtieril, a recent UniGe graduate in marine biology and ecology.
The institute also identified one of the victims as diving instructor Gianluca Benedetti.
Montefalcone had won multiple awards for her work to study and protect the marine environment, the institute said.
The Italian ambassador from the embassy in Colombo arrived in the Maldives on Friday to meet with Maldives National Defence Force Coast Guard officials, the ministry said.
The Italian Embassy in Colombo is in contact with the victims’ families and is providing assistance to 20 other Italian nationals aboard the Duke of Yoke who participated in the expedition, the ministry said.
“The vessel is awaiting an improvement in weather conditions in order to return to Malé,” the ministry said Friday.
(NEW YORK) — France has confirmed its first Ebola case linked to the outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, officials said.
The patient is a humanitarian doctor who recently returned from the DRC and has been transferred to a specialist hospital, authorities confirmed.
French health officials say the case was detected quickly, the necessary precautions are in place and that there is no indication of local spread.
“France has specialized capabilities for managing highly transmissible infectious diseases,” France’s Ministry of Health said in a statement announcing the case. “Patients are treated in a designated healthcare facility, following strict biosafety protocols (negative pressure room, dedicated equipment and protocols). Health authorities are fully mobilized and the situation is being continuously monitored.”
“All precautionary measures, including the patient’s isolation, were taken upon his arrival in the country, with transfer to the hospital under secure conditions to prevent any risk of contamination,” the statement continued.
Officials said a thorough epidemiological investigation is underway to identify individuals who may have been in contact with the patient and that they will be contacted “without delay” by the regional health agency before undergoing 21 days of home isolation while being closely monitored the entire time.
The European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control has assessed the risk of infection as “low” for European residents and travelers to areas of active transmission, and “very low” for the general European population.
The Iran South Pars Gas Complex Company is pictured on Thursday, June 23, 2005 in Assaluyeh, Iran. Ramin Talaie/Bloomberg via Getty Images
(LONDON) — Israel’s strike on the world’s largest natural gas field could severely impact Iran’s energy sector and several nearby Gulf states, energy experts told ABC News.
On Wednesday, Israel launched air strikes on South Pars, a natural gas field that covers about 3,700 square miles and serves as a vital source of fuel for Iran. It is located offshore in the Persian Gulf and contains about 1,800 trillion cubic feet of usable gas, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
South Pars accounts for about 70% of the gas Iran consumes, Ira Joseph, a senior research associate at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told ABC News.
David G. Victor, a professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California at San Diego, agreed on the importance of South Pars to Iran.
“It’s the single most important natural gas field to Iran,” he told ABC News. “If you start tanking the Iranian economy, eventually, other parts of that infrastructure are going to start falling apart too.”
South Pars is part of a giant gas field that transverses to other nations — another section, the North Dome, is part of the same natural gas field but lies in Qatari territorial waters.
Combined, South Pars and the North Field account for about 10% of the gas traded in the world and about 20% of the world’s liquified natural gas (LNG) annual exports, Joseph noted.
Iran also exports gas into Turkey, Iraq and Central Asia — so those exports have been disrupted by the war, according to Joseph. Turkey acquires up to 15% of its gas from Iran, he added.
The U.S. is relatively insulated from natural gas price shocks due to the strikes on Iran’s gas fields because the U.S. is a big producer and doesn’t have enough export capacity to fully link itself to Asian and European markets, Catherine Wolfram, a professor of energy economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told ABC News.
Countries like Japan, Korea and the Europeans who are dependent on imports will take a big hit to their supply as a result of the attack on South Pars, she said.
But the impacts of the strikes on the South Pars field extend “far beyond” energy prices, Naho Mirumachi, a professor of environmental politics at King’s College in London, told ABC News.
The current volatility of gas production can have “serious” impacts on agriculture and the global production of food, especially since natural gas is vital for fertilizer production, she noted. Fertilizer shortages or higher prices of fertilizer will likely translate to increases in food costs, according to Mirumachi.
“Food production cannot wait for gas production to return to normal, so farmers and businesses could face declining crop yields,” she said.
There has never been an attack of this magnitude on South Pars field because of a historical understanding within the region to not disrupt or inhibit each other’s vital infrastructure, according to the University of California’s Victor.
“There had been a kind of norm that exists in many wars, which is, don’t attack each other’s vital infrastructure,” he said. “Both sides had an interest in not obliterating each other’s energy infrastructure and then causing this enormous harm in the global market.”
The strike on South Pars triggered an escalation of attacks on oil and gas facilities in the region.
Iran launched a series of retaliatory strikes against the vital energy infrastructure in nearby Gulf states. It issued evacuation orders for several energy assets in Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, before hitting the world’s largest LNG terminal — an import and export facility — at Ras Laffan in Qatar.
“Targeting energy infrastructure constitutes a threat to global energy security, as well as to the peoples of the region & its environment,” a spokesperson for the QatariMinistry of Foreign Affairs wrote in a post on X on Wednesday.
In a social media post late Wednesday, President Donald Trump said neither the U.S. nor Qatar was aware Israel would attack the South Pars Gas Field, calling for Israel to not do so again unless Iran continues attacking Qatar’s LNG facilities.
“NO MORE ATTACKS WILL BE MADE BY ISRAEL pertaining to this extremely important and valuable South Pars Field unless Iran unwisely decides to attack a very innocent, in this case, Qatar,” Trump said.
Iran warned that it would target energy facilities throughout the region.
The attacks on energy centers began on March 7, with Israeli air strikes on major Iranian oil storage facilities causing “black rain” to fall on the Tehran, Iran’s capital with nearly 10 million residents. The Israeli military said the facilities were struck because they were “used by the Military Forces of the Iranian Terror Regime in Tehran.”
On March 11, the International Energy Agency announced it would release 400 million barrels of oil from its strategic reserve — the largest-ever release of reserve oil in the group’s history — in response to the blockade on the Strait of Hormuz. A fifth of the global oil supply passes through the waterway, which lies between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.
The U.S. also executed a strike on Kharg Island on March 13. The small island is situated in the Persian Gulf, off the southwestern coast of Iran, and processes 90% of Iranian oil exports.
Every military target on Kharg Island was “obliterated,” Trump said in a social media post. But its oil infrastructure was left intact.
The conflict has sent energy prices soaring, with Brent crude — the international standard for oil — peaking at $119 per barrel on Thursday morning.
A Police forensic team carry out investigations at a location near to the scene after four Hatzola ambulances were set on fire overnight next to Machzike Hadath Synagogue, on March 23, 2026 in the Golders Green area of London, England. (Photo by Leon Neal/Getty Images)
(LONDON) — Two men who were arrested as part of an investigation into an arson attack on a Jewish charity’s ambulances in the north London neighborhood of Golders Green have been released on bail, British police said on Thursday.
The men, both British nationals, were taken into custody Wednesday morning at separate addresses in northwest and central London.
They were arrested on suspicion of arson with intent to endanger life and both were taken to a London police station before being released on bail, according to London’s Metropolitan Police Service.
Four ambulances used by Hatzola, a volunteer-led ambulance service in north London, were set on fire at about 1:30 a.m. on Monday morning, police said. Three masked or hooded individuals were seen setting the fires, police said. Investigators said that they were combing through hours of CCTV footage related to the case, in part to “trace the suspects’ movements.”
Police said on Thursday that the investigation was ongoing and searches were carried out at both the addresses in northwest and central London, as well as at two other addresses in northwest London on Wednesday.
Cmdr. Helen Flanagan, head of Counter Terrorism Policing London, which is leading the investigation, said they are continuing “to work to try and identify all of those involved in this appalling attack and the investigation team is working around the clock to do this.”
“Although the two men have been released from police custody, there are strict bail conditions in place while we continue to investigate their suspected involvement in this incident,” she added. “I can reassure the public that we will be closely monitoring these while we carry out further enquiries.”
Detective Chief Superintendent Luke Williams, who leads policing in northwest London, said “an enhanced, bespoke policing plan and activity, which is particularly focused around vulnerable areas right across London, will continue over coming days and weeks.”
“This includes specialist officers and capability being deployed alongside local officers to help protect certain locations and will also involve highly visible armed police patrols to serve as a deterrent to anyone seeking to cause our communities harm,” Williams noted. “I must stress that these are precautionary and not in response to any specific threat, and we continue to work alongside our colleagues in Counter Terrorism policing to support their investigation. We will also continue to work closely with local communities and our partners to listen to their concerns and respond to these.”
