A British banking boss and his wife suffocated to death after oxygen ran out in an air bubble on the sunken Bayesian yacht, according to Italian media.
The couple were among seven people killed when the luxury yacht sank in bad weather off the coast of northern Sicily in the early hours of August 19.
Also killed in the tragedy were British tech magnate Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter Hannah, leading US lawyer Chris Morvillo and his wife Neda, and yacht chef Recaldo Thomas.
The yacht’s captain and two British members of crew are reportedly under investigation for possible manslaughter charges.
Post-mortems have found the lungs of Mr Bloomer - International Chairman of Morgan Stanley Bank - and his wife Judy were “not fully of water and neither were their stomachs or trachea”, according to Italian newspaper La Repubblica.
The outlet suggested the couple had briefly survived in an air bubble below deck, but had “suffocated” as oxygen ran out.
It suggested the air pocket was likely to have been “small and [would have] quickly filled with rising levels of toxic carbon dioxide”.
Post-mortems have suggested US couple Mr Morvillo - a lawyer at Clifford Chance - and his wife Neda drowned in the tragedy.
Further post-mortems were expected to be carried out on Mr Lynch, Hannah Lynch, and Mr Thomas on Friday.
Italian media has also reported that Mike Lynch’s wife, Angela Bacares, had rushed below deck in an attempt to alert passengers to the fact the yacht was sinking.
She previously told La Repubblica how she and Mr Lynch had been woken around 4am after the 180ft superyacht suddenly “tilted” in a violent storm.
She said that although they had initially not been worried, she got out of bed to investigate what had happened.
Glass then suddenly shattered, throwing the scene into one of confusion.
Ms Bacares suffered injuries to her feet caused by walking on broken glass, which Italian media reports she sustained while trying to warn those still in their cabins below deck.
Of the 22 passengers and crew on board, 15, including Ms Bacares, who is understood to own the yacht, were rescued after escaping on to a lifeboat.They had been on board Bayesian to celebrate Mr Lynch’s acquittal in a long-running US fraud case.
The businessman, who founded software giant Autonomy in 1996, was cleared in June of carrying out a massive fraud relating to its 11 billion dollar (£8.64 billion) sale to US company Hewlett Packard.
The yacht sinking has puzzled experts who said a vessel like the Bayesian, built by Italian high-end yacht manufacturer Perini, should have withstood the storm and should not have sunk as quickly as it did.
Italian prosecutors are reportedly investigating the boat’s 51-year-old captain James Cutfield, a New Zealander, for possible manslaughter and shipwreck charges.Two Britons - ship engineer Tim Parker Eaton and sailor Matthew Griffith - are also under investigation for the same offences, a source told news agency Reuters.
The source said Mr Parker Eaton is suspected of having failed to protect the 56-metre-long yacht's engine room and operating systems.
The investigation does not mean the crew members are guilty and does not mean formal charges will follow.
Prosecutors in the town of Termini Imerese, near Palermo, have said their investigation will take time, and will require the wreck to be salvaged from the sea.
The Bayesian is lying on the sea bed on its right side, at a depth of around 50 metres.
Expert divers spent more than four days carrying out a complex search operation, to find the missing dead.
Former London schoolgirl Hannah Lynch was the last person to be found in the search, which was hampered by the way furniture and debris had fallen during the sinking, obstructing entry to the yacht’s sleeping cabins.
