If a screenwriter were to come up with a storyline in which a tech tycoon drowns when his luxury yacht is hit by a freak storm just two days after his co-defendant in a multibillion dollar fraud trial — for which both men were recently acquitted — is fatally hit by a car in another set of ostensibly unsuspicious circumstances, they might very well be told this was rather too implausible for viewers to buy.

And yet this was the tragic real-life series of events over the past week or so. The body of Autonomy co-founder Mike Lynch was recovered on Thursday, along with four others who had been on board Bayesian when it sank off the coast of Sicily in the early hours of Monday (the body of Lynch’s 18-year-old daughter was found later), while former colleague Stephen Chamberlain died after a car hit him during a run on Saturday.

It didn’t take long for the conspiracy theories to start. Pro-Russia personality Chay Bowes posted on X a clip of himself speaking on the Russian state-owned RT channel in which he pointed out the low probability of being acquitted in a federal criminal trial in the US — about 0.4 per cent, according to Pew. “How could two of the statistically most charmed men alive both meet tragic ends within days of each other in the most improbable ways?” asked Bowes.