The captain of a boat carrying seven Japanese women during a scuba diving accident has appeared in court in Bali accused of negligence.
The accident left two of the seven divers dead. The five others were found after a search.
During a hearing at a district court in Denpasar, a government prosecutor alleged that the 30-year-old captain changed his boat’s location without waiting for the divers to surface.
Based on the accounts of the five survivors, the prosecutor said the group surfaced after a 40-minute dive off the island of Nusa Lembongan, late in the afternoon of February 14, but the boat was nowhere to be found.
Unable to afford a lawyer, the boat skipper appeared alone in court.
When the presiding judge asked if he had understood the content of the indictment, he said: "I didn’t leave them while they were diving. I lost their traces, then tried to search for them, but I couldn’t find them."
According to the Japan Times, the captain earlier told police investigators that after the divers entered the water, the sky turned cloudy, so he tried to locate them by following the air bubbles produced on the water’s surface, but heavy rain fell, obscuring the bubbles.
He faces up to five years’ imprisonment if convicted.
