Rescue team release photographs showing where five Italian divers lost their lives in Maldives death caves

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An elite Finnish diver posted photographs showing the inside of the caves. It is believed the tragic divers died after a sandbank partially obscured their route back to the surface.

The bodies of Monica Montefalcone, a marine biology professor; her daughter, Giorgia Sommacal; and two young researchers, Federico Gualtieri and Muriel Oddenino, will be returned home tomorrow.

The body of boat captain Gianluca Benedetti, has already been recovered.

Authorities are investigating how the divers were down nearly 200ft when the maximum depth allowed for tourists is 98ft.

Cameras belonging to the dead divers have also been recovered, with the hope that their contents will shed more light on how the group lost their lives.

The Finnish rescue dive team posted online: "Inside the inner chambers.

"This second series of images documents the more confined inner sections of the cave, where visibility can rapidly disappear due to disturbed coral sediment and navigation becomes more complex.

"These are the environments where the rescue team operated during the search & recovery mission over the past days.

"Honor to the rescuers and the team. A prayer for the victims and their loved ones.

"We continue to work closely with the authorities as the case moves forward."

The group that entered the cave on Thursday was led by Monica Montefalcone, 51, a University of Genoa professor and marine ecologist who was a regular diver in Maldivian waters in the Indian Ocean. Her daughter was among the four researchers who died, along with an instructor.

The instructor's body was the first to have been recovered, from a depth of 60 metres (200 feet).

It is the deadliest single incident in the country's diving history.

Mohamed Hussain Shareef, chief spokesperson at the Maldives president’s office, said the government had given the group the necessary permit to research soft corals in the Devana Kandu site.

"What we didn't know was that it was cave diving," Shareef said. "Because, as divers will tell you and appreciate, it's a very different discipline with its own sets of challenges and risks involved, and particularly at that depth, there are any number of things that could have gone wrong."

Montefalcone's husband Carlo Sommacal said in interviews with Italian media that his wife would have never put her daughter or others at risk. He described her as "one of the best divers in the world" who had carried out about 5,000 dives and was "always conscientious" and "never reckless."

"I’m sorry, I wasn’t there and I’m no expert, and from what I’m seeing and reading, even the experts don’t have definite answers but are merely making hypotheses – lots of them," he told Reuters.

Expert divers from Finland spotted the four remaining bodies on Monday inside the cave's third and last chamber, "pretty much together," Shareef said.

Two of them were recovered on Tuesday and the other two were expected to be brought to the surface on Wednesday, he said.

Highlighting the difficulties of diving at that depth, a Maldivian rescuer died last week while attempting to recover the bodies.

The non-profit Divers Alert Network Europe, which is leading the rescue mission, said its expert divers had to use advanced technical systems, including closed-circuit rebreathers that recycle exhaled breathing gas to locate the bodies.

Shafraz Naeem, a Maldivian diving veteran who has explored the Devana Kandu cave system over 30 times and now consults with the country's defence forces and police, said the entrance to the cave was about 55 metres deep and light reached only the first chamber and it was pitch dark after that.

Experts say that as a diver goes deeper, the pressure around them rises, which means each breath delivers more oxygen into the lungs and bloodstream, even if they are breathing normal air. If this exposure is too high or lasts too long, oxygen begins to over-stimulate the central nervous system and damages tissues.

"It is incredibly dangerous to conduct dives at these depths on compressed air," Naeem said. "Theoretically oxygen toxicity starts to occur on compressed air at about 55 metres."

But Riccardo Gambacorta, former diving instructor of one of the victims, Muriel Oddenino, said he did not believe that the Italians died because of oxygen intoxication.

"My personal opinion is that an unexpected incident may have occurred underwater. They essentially did not anticipate a certain situation," he said.