Incessant searches to find the body of the forty-four year old Chinese man but with Italian citizenship, Zhu Guozheng, of Toscolano Maderno who fell from his boat around 12.30pm on June 22nd Lake Garda at the height of Gargnano. According to the reconstruction of the dynamics of the events entrusted to coast guard personnel, the alarm was raised by two Austrian tourists who noticed the Asian citizen in difficulty in the water. Then he disappeared in an area of the upper lake where the seabed has a depth of over 200 meters, about 350 meters from the Gargnano coast.
Immediately afterwards the witnesses alerted the emergency services. Thus, two coast guard vessels arrived promptly on site, with the maritime rescuer on board, who carried out a search activity in the water in snorkeling mode. Among the waters of Benaco there is also a naval vessel and a fire brigade helicopter, with divers from Milan and the naval unit of Garda volunteers equipped with Rov and sonar (precisely those used for the searches of the twenty-year-old German Chiara Lindl missing since 1 September 2023 in the waters of the Sebino) for the use of depth instrumentation.
But the area where the forty-four year old Chinese fell from the boat is particularly deep. This makes rescuers’ operations very complicated. An activity that continued throughout the afternoon yesterday, unfortunately without success until late in the evening. In the meantime, the boat of the missing person living in Toscolano Maderno has been transferred to the port of Bogliacowhile the Carabinieri of the Salò Company are acquiring more information from the Austrian tourists who saw the man drowning to understand the exact dynamics of what happened in Garda.
It is not clear, in fact, whether the forty-four-year-old jumped from his boat for a swim, considering the heat, or was struck by an illness and fell. While waiting to find the man’s body, it must be remembered that this is the first tragedy in the waters of Italy’s main freshwater basin. Last year there were eight deaths. An alarming figure that included both the Brescia side and the Verona and Trentino side.
In the province of Brescia there was a death on a jet ski on the night of August 15th in the Punta Grò area of Sirmione, when Francesco Zanetti, a 32-year-old originally from Sona, in the province of Verona, lost his life. The young man had died in the area where the roste, or old fishing structures, are still located for a few days now. Finally, it should be remembered that in 2023, as many as five people drowned in Lake Garda.
