Italian liner toll up to eleven, 20 missing

Early view yesterday of the cruise liner Costa Concordia aground in front of the harbour of Isola del Giglio after hitting underwater rocks on January 13

Divers searching for survivors inside a stricken cruise ship off the Italian coast found five more bodies yesterday, as prosecutors grilled the arrested captain over his role.
The bodies were discovered after the Italian navy used explosives to blow holes in the wreck of the Costa Concordia to help in the hunt for those still missing after Friday’s disaster off the Tuscan island of Giglio.
“Scuba divers found five more bodies in the stern of the ship,” Cristiano Pellegrini, a Giglio official, told AFP, but said their identities were not yet known.
The death toll has now risen to 11, leaving about two dozen still missing of the 4,200 people on board when the ship went down on Friday,
Earlier, officials had said that 12 Germans, six Italians, four French, two Americans, one Hungarian, one Indian and one Peruvian were still unaccounted for. There were also reports of a missing five-year-old Italian girl.
Six bodies had earlier been found in the Costa Concordia, which came to grief off the picturesque island of Giglio in Tuscany late on Friday.
Two French passengers and one Peruvian crew member had drowned after jumping into the chilly Mediterranean waters to escape.
“The conditions inside are disastrous. It’s very difficult. The corridors are cluttered and it’s hard for the divers to swim through,” Rodolfo Raiteri, head of the coastguard service’s diving team, earlier told AFP.
Choppy seas forced a temporary evacuation of the stricken 17-deck cruise ship for several hours on Monday after it slipped on a rocky shelf under the sea, sparking fears that the hulk could sink entirely.
Giglio mayor Sergio Ortelli warned that the stricken vessel, which hit submerged rocks and keeled over off the island holiday spot, was an “ecological timebomb” in the pristine waters of a marine nature reserve.
The head of the company that owns the vessel said it had hit a rock as a result of an “inexplicable” error by the captain, Francesco Schettino, who was arrested on Saturday along with first officer Ciro Ambrosio.
“He carried out a manoeuvre which had not been approved by us and we disassociate ourselves from such behaviour,” said Pier Luigi Foschi, the boss of Costa Crociere, Europe’s largest cruise operator.
Italian prosecutors accuse Schettino and Ambrosio of multiple manslaughter and abandoning ship before all the passengers were rescued.
A transcript of a conversation between Schettino and a port official was released Monday showing that the captain refused to return to the ship.
“You must tell us how many people, children, women and passengers are there and the exact number of each category,” the official tells Schettino, according to the transcript of the conversation on one of the ship’s “black boxes”.
“What are you doing? Are you abandoning the rescue?” the official says.
The Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,200 people when it ran aground shortly after starting a seven-day Mediterranean cruise on its way to Marseille in France and Barcelona in Spain, just as many passengers were having dinner.
Island residents have already said the ship was sailing far too close to Giglio and had hit a reef known as the School Rocks, well known to inhabitants.
The Corriere della Sera reported Monday that the captain had passed close to the island’s rocky shores to please the head waiter who comes from Giglio.
It also quoted witnesses as claiming the waiter had warned Schettino just before the accident happened: “Careful, we are extremely close to the shore.”
A Dutch company specialising in salvage operations, Smit, was to begin pumping out the ship’s 2,380 tons of fuel this week. Officials said the ship itself could then be taken off Giglio in an unprecedented operation using massive floating devices.