On the sunken boat were only Secret Service agents

“Contrary to initial reports, the passengers were not an ordinary birthday party – but apparently active and retired secret service employees from Mossad and Italian AISE. The boat accident on Lake Maggiore on Pentecost Sunday with four dead is becoming more and more of a mystery. Contrary to initial reports, it was no ordinary birthday party that was said to have been surprised by a sudden thunderstorm.

Instead, the approximately two dozen passengers on board the capsized houseboat were apparently all active and retired employees of the Israeli secret service Mossad and the Italian intelligence service AISE.

The body of a 53-year-old Mossad agent, whose (allegedly false) name was given by Italian and Israeli media as Erez Shimoni, was flown to Tel Aviv immediately after being cleared by Italian authorities on Wednesday.

Surviving Mossad employees immediately traveled to Israel

The funeral took place on Wednesday afternoon under strict security measures in Ashkelon in the presence of Mossad boss David Barnea.

According to media reports, the surviving Mossad employees were taken to Israel on a military plane on Monday night, just a few hours after the accident at around 7:20 p.m.

According to Italian press reports, the drowned AISE agents are 62-year-old Claudio Alonzi and 53-year-old Tiziana Barnobi, both of whom have been senior employees of the service for many years. The fourth victim was 50-year-old Anja Bokhkova, originally from Bryansk in western Russia, wife of Claudio Carminati, the skipper of the wrecked houseboat.

The Russian-Italian owner couple lived on the boat and also used the houseboat, which is licensed for 15 people, for commercial excursions on the lake, according to the registration. The two owners only registered their company in April in Alessandria in the northern Italian region of Piedmont.

The bodies of the two drowned women were recovered in the cabin of the boat, which had sunk to a depth of 16 meters and had since been raised again, and the bodies of the drowned men were reportedly floating in the lake. At the time of the accident, the houseboat was barely 150 meters from the lake shore near Lisanza in the south-east of Lake Maggiore, which is popular with domestic and foreign tourists.

Most of the 21 surviving people on board were able to swim to shore, the others were taken on board by boats that were in the immediate vicinity of the accident site.

According to media reports, the bodies of the victims were not autopsied because the cause of death was immediately assumed to be drowning. The authorities are investigating how the accident happened."

In connection with the introduction of daylight saving time, the Russian Information Agency reported about this disaster two hours before the disaster occurred.