SYDNEY, Australia — Two divers who survived 19 hours at sea after their tour boat allegedly abandoned them on the Great Barrier Reef last year are suing the Nine Network over claims they deliberately hid from the dive company so they could sell their story to the media. The diving instructors Allyson Dalton and Richard Neely, who live in California, were rumoured to have received up to $1 million in media deals after selling the rights to their story of survival off the Whitsunday Islands in May last year - an amount they have denied. But the deals, brokered through the celebrity agent Max Markson, gave rise to suspicion and prompted the Queensland Premier, Anna Bligh, to suggest they should donate the money to pay for their search and rescue. Ms Dalton and Mr Neely were spotted by a rescue plane 14 kilometres from their diving spot near Hamilton Island after instructors failed to collect them in a dinghy and bring them back to the boat after they surfaced from a dive. Nine's A Current Affair broadcast three reports about the couple in July last year, first from their point of view and later from the perspective of the dive instructor, Kylie Irwin, who said the diving company had searched for them exhaustively and that they did not want to be found. Mr Irwin told the program they must have set the whole thing up because it would have been "physically impossible" for spotters on the boat not to have seen them if they had surfaced within 200 metres of the boat as they said they did and inflated their safety device. "It's all lies," Mr Irwin said. Queensland Workplace Health and Safety investigated the couple's story and found it to be true, recommending criminal charges against the boat operator, OzSail. In a defamation claim in the Supreme Court, the couple allege A Current Affair implied they were liars, that they had destroyed Mr Irwin's career by making false allegations and that they had faked their own disappearance in order to sell their story for a vast sum. The couple claim their reputations have suffered. The network says that when it broadcast Mr Irwin's version of events it was merely putting the other side of the story, having dedicated one program to the couple's criticism of Mr Irwin and his diving operation. Meanwhile, Queensland's Attorney-General is considering appealing against the sentence given to an American man over the scuba-diving death of his wife on the Great Barrier Reef. David Gabriel Watson, 32, was sentenced to 4.5 years' jail, suspended after 12 months, for the manslaughter of Christina while on their honeymoon in 2003. He had pleaded not guilty to murder, but prosecutors accepted his guilty plea to the lesser charge. by Harriet Alexander | 
