At least one person was killed and six others, including a British software mogul, were missing on Monday after a sailing yacht carrying 22 people sank during a violent storm off the coast of Sicily, Italian officials said.

The yacht sank after a storm “with strong winds” struck around 5 a.m., according to Luciano Pischedda, the Italian Coast Guard official overseeing the rescue operations. The vessel had been anchored about a half-mile off Porticello, about 12 miles east of the Sicilian capital, Palermo.

Camper & Nicholsons, managers of the sailing yacht, said in an emailed statement that there were 12 guests and 10 crew onboard.

The authorities have yet to determine what caused the yacht to sink. “This will be ascertained later,” Mr. Pischedda said, adding that several crew members were in the hospital and had not spoken to investigators.

Among the dead and missing, four were British, two were American, and one was a man with dual citizenship from Canada and Antigua, he said.

One of those unaccounted for is Mike Lynch, a British software mogul who was acquitted in the United States in June of fraud, according to a person with knowledge of the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about it.

His wife, Angela Bacares, was rescued. Mr. Lynch, who once was described as Britain’s Bill Gates, had fought for more than a decade against accusations that he had defrauded Hewlett-Packard when he sold it his company, Autonomy, for $11 billion. The legal battle represented one of the biggest fraud cases in Silicon Valley history.

Salvatore Cocina, a top official with Sicily’s civil protection agency, said that Mr. Lynch’s daughter, Hannah Lynch, was also among the six people missing. All were passengers on the yacht, the Coast Guard said.

Mr. Cocina said the body that had been recovered was that of the yacht’s cook.

A passenger ship sailing under the flag of the Netherlands, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, anchored nearby, provided immediate assistance to the 15 surviving passengers, Mr. Pischedda said.

Karsten Börner, the captain of the Sir Robert, said in a telephone interview said he had to steady his ship to “keep it in position” during what he described as very strong winds. During the storm, the yacht seemed to disappear, he said. “At a certain moment she was gone behind us,” he said.

After the wind dropped down, “we couldn’t see the yacht any more, and then we saw a red flare,” he added. When he and a colleague went to check out the flare’s position, they spotted a “life raft adrift with 15 people on board, one of them a baby and four people injured,” he said. They were taken aboard the Sir Robert and Captain Börner contacted the Coast Guard, which brought the survivors to shore.

Captain Börner said he didn’t know when the ship went down because the storm made it difficult to see clearly. The wind was “really violent,” he said.

For the most part, the survivors didn’t speak much he said. “They were all under shock,” he said. “It was a bad, bad situation.”

Monday’s storm surprised experts with its intensity.

Col. Attilio Di Diodato, director of the Italian Air Force’s Center for Aerospace Meteorology and Climatology, said the agency had registered intense lighting activity and strong gusts of wind in the area at the time of the accident.

“It was very intense and brief in duration,” he said of the storm. He could not rule out that it had been a waterspout, or small tornado, but nevertheless called it “an important event.”

Italy’s firefighter corps said that its divers had started carrying out a search and rescue mission at dawn.

On Monday afternoon, expert divers with the firefighter corps arrived in Porticello to search the sunken vessel, which was under about 165 feet of water.

Operations at that depth, were “complicated,” and required specialized divers, said Luca Cari, a spokesman for the firefighters.

Fabio Cefalù, a fisherman in Porticello, told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica that he saw a waterspout — a sort of mini-tornado — that lasted “about 12 minutes” off the shore of Porticello shortly before 4 a.m.

Around 4:10, he said he saw a red flare go off “about 500 meters from the shore.” He said he waited for the weather to calm down, and went out about 20 minutes later to the site where the flare had gone off.

“We found only the cushions, and a few planks” floating in the water, he told the newspaper. There was no sign of the ship, and he immediately called the coast guard.

The boat, identified by Italian officials as the Bayesian, is an Italian-made 56-meter-long sailing yacht first launched in 2008, according to the website marinetraffic.com, which tracks ships. It sails under the flag of Britain, and was built by Perini Navi, an Italian luxury yacht maker.

Eight of the 15 passengers who were rescued were taken to hospitals in Palermo, the coast guard said. Camper & Nicholsons, the managers of the yacht, said its priority was to “provide all necessary support to the rescued passengers and crew.”

Giuseppe D’Agostino, the mayor of Santa Flavia, which includes Porticello, said the survivors would be cared for at a local hotel. The city had also brought them immediate necessities, like toiletries and clothes.

He said in a telephone interview that he had not spoken to the survivors since “they’re in shock.”

The youngest passenger onboard, a 1-year-old girl named Sophie, was taken to the Di Cristina hospital in Palermo with her mother, Charlotte, who had some scrapes and cuts, said Domenico Cipolla, director of the pediatric emergency room at the hospital.

Sophie’s father was in the hospital’s adult emergency room and had been in contact with his wife and daughter by phone, Dr. Cipolla said. He was not permitted to release the family’s surname. Both mother and child were in good condition apart from “great emotional stress” he added in a telephone interview.

“We’re comforting them more than curing them,” he said.

Michael J. de la Merced contributed reporting.

When her parents denied her food and water for eight days, the girl said that she knew she was going to die, just like her two younger siblings. For days, her parents had beaten her when they caught her sipping water or looking for food. Famished and frail, she said they dressed her in special attire worn for death.

“The children were not supposed to eat, so they could die,” the child, a 9-year-old identified only as EG and hidden inside a witness protection booth, told a packed courtroom on Thursday in the coastal Kenyan city of Mombasa.

She was among the first witnesses to testify last week in the manslaughter trial of Paul Nthenge Mackenzie, an evangelical pastor accused of commanding members of his church to starve their children and themselves to death in order to meet Jesus in the end times.

The pastor and 93 other defendants, including his top associates and some of his followers, denied the manslaughter allegations and pleaded not guilty at the start of the trial.

In three other courts, Mr. Mackenzie and several of the other suspects are facing separate charges of murder, terrorism and child torture and abuse. Earlier this year, the Kenyan government declared Mr. Mackenzie’s church, Good News International Ministries, “an organized criminal group.”

Since April last year, 429 bodies have been exhumed from shallow graves in the Shakahola Forest in southeastern Kenya, where members of the doomsday cult lived, the authorities said. While some died of starvation, others were strangled, beaten and suffocated, according to the lead government pathologist. Dozens of people have been rescued, but hundreds more are still missing, officials say.

For the last 16 months, the East African nation has been both riveted and horrified by the story of how one man was able to convince hundreds of people that the world was coming to an end and that they should follow him into a forest teeming with wild animals.

“The case before you, your honor, is not just for a trial, but for a reckoning,” Betty Rubia, one of the prosecutors, told the Mombasa chief magistrate, the Hon. Alex Ithuku, who is hearing the case. This “is about the exploitation of faith, the erosion of humanity and the chilling cost of blind devotion.”

At the Mombasa Law Courts last week, the suspects arrived chained in pairs — except for Mr. Mackenzie and his second-in-command, Smart Mwakalama, who each walked in alone and in handcuffs. In the humid, packed courtroom, the defendants sat looking forlorn, with some drifting to sleep as the proceedings got underway. None of the victims’ family members were there; many of them are day laborers lacking the time or money to attend hearings regularly, activists said.

A few of the suspects appeared weak; during a lunch break, a prison guard was heard voicing her concern to another officer about one defendant’s reluctance to consume the bread and milk she had been given.

One suspect died in jail, the authorities said last week, and an inquest was underway to determine the circumstances of that death.

As witnesses arrived, security officers, some carrying guns, stood shoulder-to-shoulder to prevent the suspects from seeing them. Prosecutors said they had lined up 90 witnesses, including minors, to take the stand in the case. Among them are 13 anonymous witnesses, referred to only by their initials, and whose voices were beamed from a speaker atop the enclosed witness booth.

One 17-year-old boy, identified as IA, described how families fell prey to the apocalyptic message of Mr. Mackenzie, who urged them to shun education, modern medicine and beauty products. The pastor also urged his flock to destroy any documents, including identity cards and birth certificates. The boy said his mother — whose remains have yet to be found — sold household items and was lured to Shakahola Forest with the promise of land, which could be had for as little as $20 an acre.

The gathering in the forest grew during the Covid-19 pandemic, with the expanding congregation building makeshift homes in areas given biblical names like Bethlehem and Jerusalem. There, witnesses said, at Mr. Mackenzie’s urging they began plans to starve the children first before the adults could join them.

As they deprived the children of food, parents would make them wear special clothing, they said.

“Those are my death clothes,” the 9-year-old told the still courtroom after she was shown an exhibit submitted as evidence inside the enclosed booth. The clothes were not shown to spectators in the courtroom.

She said she was wearing those clothes when officers rescued her. By then, her two younger siblings, whom she had tried to save by giving them water, had starved to death before her eyes.

The witnesses faced intense cross-examination from the defense lawyer, Lawrence Obonyo, who questioned their memory of events and where and when they heard Mr. Mackenzie say they should starve. Another witness, a 17-year-old girl identified as JCK, gave conflicting accounts about where they lived after her mother pulled her from school.

Activists and human rights groups have criticized the length of time prosecutors took in starting the trial, saying it could hamper the victims’ ability to deliver crucial testimony. Hearings in the trial will resume on Sept. 9.

They have also questioned the government’s choice of defendants. Some of those being tried “are victims themselves and should not have been charged,” said Shipeta Mathias, a rapid response officer with HAKI Africa, a Mombasa-based human rights organization. Mr. Mathias was among the emergency workers who arrived at Shakahola last year when some of the rescued church members were still refusing to eat.

“We had to lie to some of them that we had been sent by Jesus so they could eat,” he said of some of the defendants. “They are brainwashed, and they need help.”

The case has also shined an uncomfortable spotlight on the effectiveness of Kenya’s police force.

Families searching for their loved ones say they sought help from law enforcement, but in vain. Local community members, suspicious about the activities in the forest, filed numerous reports with the police, who failed to follow up or investigate. Rights groups also criticized the force for not monitoring Mr. Mackenzie, who was arrested several times and, at one point, even charged with radicalization and promoting extreme beliefs, though that case went nowhere.

Family members and their advocates say they are also frustrated with the slow rollout of DNA testing. Just three dozen bodies have so far been matched with family members, officials and activists say, disappointing those who want to give their loved ones the final dignity of a proper burial.

“What we need to get is justice for the people we lost,” said Paul Chengo, a manual laborer who said he was missing six members of his family. “What we need is closure.”

Mohamed Ahmed contributed reporting from Mombasa.

The Nicaraguan government on Monday canceled the legal status of 1,500 nonprofit organizations — many of them evangelical religious groups — in the authoritarian government’s continued effort to quash people and institutions that are not allied with the government.

More than 5,000 nonprofit organizations, including church groups, have been shut down in Nicaragua since 2018. Monday’s sweep of 1,500 civic and religious groups was by far the largest in a single day.

The measure came just days after the government banished from the country two Catholic priests who had been detained earlier this month.

Monday’s decision was notable because President Daniel Ortega’s government had until now focused its ire on the Roman Catholic Church, particularly in regions where high-profile bishops and priests had spoken out against human rights abuses.

Evangelical pastors had largely stayed out of the political fray. But the elimination of hundreds of their churches on Monday shows the Ortega administration is expanding its effort to silence religious leaders and close off any independent space not affiliated with the government, said Martha Patricia Molina, a Nicaraguan lawyer who tracks attacks against churches and clergy.

“All of their properties are going to be confiscated,” said Ms. Molina, who fled Nicaragua in 2021 and now lives in Texas. “This is an attack against religious freedom.”

Mr. Ortega and his wife, Vice President Rosario Murillo, have presided over an increasingly autocratic regime that has seen them take control over virtually all government institutions, including the legislature, courts and elections.

In 2018, hundreds of thousands of people throughout the country protested against cuts to social security and eroding democracy in a quest to topple the government, but the pair responded with a tough crackdown. Hundreds of people were killed, imprisoned or forced out of the country.

Ms. Murillo, who serves as spokeswoman for the government, did not respond to a request for comment.

Since that uprising, nearly 250 priests, nuns, bishops and other members of the Catholic church were forced out of the country, according to a report that Ms. Molina released Friday. Some of them fled, but three bishops and 136 priests were expelled.

The region of Matagalpa traditionally had around 71 priests but now just 13 remain, she said.

A Jesuit university was shut down and taken over by the government last year, and in June this year, 20 Protestant churches were slammed with unexplained exorbitant fines.

The Nicaraguan Ministry of Interior closed the organizations this week, saying they had failed to meet their legal obligations to report their finances, according to a notice published in the Nicaraguan government’s legal register.

The notice listed the 1,500 organizations, which included hundreds of small faith groups, many of them affiliated with Pentecostal and Baptist churches.

The government uses a repressive legal framework to persecute Catholic and Protestant communities through arrest, imprisonment and the seizure of property, according to a June report by the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, a U.S. government commission that monitors the universal right to freedom of religion or belief abroad. Laws ostensibly meant to combat terrorism and money laundering are instead used to arbitrarily cancel the legal status and seize the property of such groups, the report said.

The government-controlled legislature passed several laws that created onerous financial reporting requirements for nonprofit organizations, making it difficult for them to comply. Even Catholic charity groups have found themselves faced with money laundering charges.

The June report by the U.S. commission said the government has engaged in increasingly repressive actions against Protestant communities. Members of the Evangelical Church and the Moravian Church were threatened, and their services were either prohibited or conspicuously monitored, the report said.

“I think that the church in Nicaragua has always been on the side of the truth,” said Félix Navarrete, a Nicaraguan lawyer and Catholic church activist who fled shortly after the 2018 uprising and is now the Hispanic ministry coordinator for the Archdiocese of Indianapolis.

“One of the government’s biggest fears is that through religious leaders, the people of Nicaragua can have change,” he said. “They are trying to avoid that at all costs.”