The former boss of the military diver who died trying to recover the bodies of missing tourists from a deep Maldives cave said the rescue team was “not trained” to enter the “unforgiving and dangerous” underwater chambers.

Sgt. Major Mohamed Mahudhee was sent into a dangerous cave system almost 200 feet underwater, searching for five divers who vanished in a scuba-diving accident in the Maldives.

The group of missing divers included instructor Gianluca Benedetti, 44, Muriel Oddenino, 31, Federico Gualtieri, 31, University of Genova lecturer Monica Montefalcone, 52, and her 20-year-old daughter, Giorgia Sommacal.

The divers failed to resurface after entering the cave system, triggering a large-scale recovery operation in one of the region’s most challenging underwater environments.

One rescue diver failed to resurface

According to the BBC, the eight-member Maldives National Defence Force (MNDF) rescue team had already cleared two of the cave’s three chambers when 44-year-old Mahudhee – who headed the group – failed to return to the surface.

“Eight rescue divers went into the water today. When they surfaced, they realized Mr. Mahudhee didn’t come up,” a Maldivian government spokesman told the BBC.

The other divers jumped back into the water to search for the man and found that he had blacked out.

The diver was taken to a hospital in critical condition, where he later died, BBC reported.

Mission was too dangerous

Following Mahudhee’s death, former military diver Shafraz Naeem spoke to the Maldives Independent about the dangers tied to the operation.

Naeem, who now works as a consultant for the MNDF, said Mahudhee had once trained under him and described the sergeant major as highly skilled.

“He was a student of mine,” Shafraz told the outlet of his close friend. “He worked under me for a lot of years. He is one of the best.”

‘Not trained to go’

Still, Naeem said the conditions inside the cave required a level of technical preparation the divers allegedly did not have.

“MNDF went on normal air. They are not trained to go,” the expert cave diver said.

According to Naeem, the military had access to advanced rebreather systems donated by the Japanese government, but the team was reportedly still training with the equipment and could not safely use it below certain depths.

“But they are still training on that – they can’t go below 40 metres (about 131 feet) on that,” he told the Maldives Independent.

The cave system reportedly extended far deeper.