Death of Stephen Chamberlain “not unusual” according to police

British police say there is no evidence to suggest that the death of a former colleague of missing technology magnate Mike Lynch was “suspicious or inappropriate.”

Stephen Chamberlain, 52, died in hospital on Saturday after being hit by a car while jogging in Stretham, Cambridgeshire – near his home in Longstanton.

Mr Lynch is one of among the missing after the yacht Bayesian sank in a storm off Sicily on Monday.

Cambridgeshire Police said officers had not had any contact with Italian police and would not travel to Italy.

Mr Lynch and Mr Chamberlain were business partners and were defendants in a fraud trial in the United States earlier this year.

American prosecutors brought fraud charges in connection with the $11 billion (£8.6 billion) sale of Lynch's software company Autonomy to Hewlett-Packard in 2011.

Both were acquitted.

Mr. Chamberlain was a finance manager at Autonomy, a company co-founded by Mr. Lynch in 1996.

Hewlett Packard (HP) won a billion-dollar civil case in the High Court in London in 2022 after suing Mr Lynch.

“All we can do is investigate the incident in our county. So far there is no indication of anything suspicious or unusual. We are convinced that this is a tragic road traffic accident,” a spokeswoman for Cambridgeshire Police told the BBC.

“We are investigating Saturday's collision, but officials are not travelling to Italy.”

She said Cambridgeshire officials had had no contact with Italian police investigating the yacht's sinking.

Mr Lynch, 59, whose 18-year-old daughter Hannah is also missing, grew up near Chelmsford, Essex, and had a home near Pettistree, Suffolk.

He studied at the University of Cambridge and in 1991 helped found Cambridge Neurodynamics, a company specialising in computer-aided fingerprint capture and recognition.

Autonomy was developed five years later and uses a statistical method called “Bayesian inference” at the core of its software.