A man from Malta has been set free after the court found him innocent of the death of his long-time diving partner three years ago.

Arthur Castillo, 60, was reportedly convicted of involuntary manslaughter through the negligence of technical diver, scuba instructor, freediver and Afghanistan veteran Christine Gauci, aged 35, in November 2022.

But Gauci, who was Castillo’s diving partner for years, died after she reportedly encountered difficulties while diving in the Mgarr ix-Xini bay, on the island of Gozo, Malta.

Reports claimed that while the two were diving, Gauci uncontrollably shot towards the surface, after which she was found face-down in the water near the rocky shore with no air left in her tanks.

Castillo was handed down a two-year-long suspended sentence and fined with two-thirds of the expert-witness costs after it was stated that he failed to keep contact with Gauci “to ensure she was okay all the time” in November.

The court at the time claimed that he had ignored the buddy system which is the state of safety procedures that two divers follow, including monitoring and assisting each other, during a dive.

But, Castillo later appealed the sentence arguing among other issues that the court needed to prove the cause of death and that judges have completely ignored experts’ conclusions regarding the buddy system.

He also claimed that Gauci who had served in the British Army and was a more experienced diver than him had been awake for the preceding 20 hours prior to the dive because of work duties.

Castillo then explained that his girlfriend had even tried to convince the woman not to dive, but Gauci insisted that the cold water would refresh her and wake her up.

In the most recent court hearing, appeal court presiding judge Madame Justice Consuelo Scerri Herrera cleared him out of all criminal liability on Wednesday, 22nd February.

Herrera claimed that the original court misinterpreted the diving buddy system, which according to her, did not mean that the two divers were responsible for each other’s actions.

She said: “Even through its very name, this court interprets the buddy system as providing that two individuals should be there for one another to assist each other, but this does not mean that they are responsible for one another.”

The court noted that Gauci’s autopsy had established the causes of death as coronary artery atheroma and seawater drowning.

Experts’ reports claimed that one of the 35-year-old woman’s arteries had been narrowed by 80 per cent at the time of her death.

Herrera added that “the appellant had not been acting as the victim’s instructor, but it emerged that they had been friends who had dived together many times before.”

She also stated that Castillo had helped the woman to overcome all of the obstacles that she had encountered during that dive, and even gave her some of his lead weights when she was unable to maintain negative buoyancy.

She concluded by saying that if the man had tried to follow her directly when she had shot to the surface “there would have been two fatalities, not one.”

Right before acquitting Castillo, Herrera added: “The court does not believe that the appellant was negligent and that therefore he could not have prevented this incident from happening.”