The yacht skipper who allegedly killed a young man in Cala Bona told a Manacor on Monday that he did not realise what he had done and that he had not been drinking. The judge has ordered the withdrawal of the passport of Dennis Viehof, a 35-year-old German multimillionaire, and his sailing licence. The man is accused of a crime of reckless homicide and another of failure to render assistance. Viehof explained that he was travelling at around 22 knots and that he was not sailing recklessly.
The lawyer for the skipper of the yacht ‘La Luna’ spoke to the media at the end of his client’s statement. “The witnesses who have testified so far have said that they saw him some 400 metres away from the group of boats that were fishing. 400 metres is the length of four football pitches, it’s a long way, isn’t it? There’s no way you can say he was sailing recklessly.”
The lawyer added that the boat in which the victim, Guiem Comamala, was sailing with his uncle and his cousin, had no lights on. “It’s a disgrace,” he stated. “You can’t criminalise behaviour for the sake of it.” The accident occurred around ten o’clock at night on 23 August in the waters off Cala Bona. Dennis Viehof was sailing with a group of friends on board his father’s 20-metre luxury yacht, ‘La Luna’, and flying the German flag, when, off Cap Pinar, it ran over the small boat in which Guiem was fishing with his uncle and his cousin.
The victim, who died instantly after being hit by the propellers, was in the area of the outboard motor and the other two occupants were unharmed. “The yacht was travelling at full speed, we screamed like crazy”, the young man’s uncle told Última Hora the day after the accident.
The investigators from the Guardia Civil concluded that Dennis Viehof was sailing at an “excessive speed” in an area where there was a high concentration of fishing boats and that in the accident there was a possible concurrence of responsibility between the skippers of the two boats involved.
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