Stricken ship’s captain blames company pressure—report

GIGLIO ISLAND—The confirmed death toll from the wreck of the stricken Costa Concordia liner has reached 16, amid media reports that the Italian captain blames company pressure for his criticized actions.

Fire brigade divers recovered the 15th body on Tuesday as salvage crews prepared to pump 2,380 tons of fuel from its tanks.

The body was found on the third deck where some of the 114,500-ton vessel’s lifeboats were located, with rescuers declining to give further details on the grim discovery 11 days after the Mediterranean tragedy.

The grim news came amid media reports that captain Francesco Schettino told a friend the day after the January 13 disaster that a manager from the cruise company pressured him to sail too close to shore.

“In my place, another would not have been so ready to pass there, but they got to me with their ‘Pass through there, pass through there’,” media reported Schettino saying in comments secretly recorded by police the day after the January 13 shipwreck.

“The rocks were there, but the instruments I had weren’t showing them, so I went through,” said Schettino, who is now being held in custody.

“So, here we are and it’s me who’s paying for everything.”

Schettino, who has also been accused of fleeing the stricken ship before his passengers were safe, did not say when he had left the Costa Concordia but did tell his interlocutor that he had left it “when it began to list.”

The luxury liner capsized off the tiny Tuscan island of Giglio with more than 4,000 people on board. On top of those confirmed dead, 16 people are still unaccounted for.

Emergency workers also identified one of the victims found so far as 30-year-old Maria D’Introno, whose relatives survived the disaster and said she was too scared to jump into the sea when the order came to abandon the ship.

The story of D’Introno — who had a life jacket but did not know how to swim — is one of the many dramas from a chaotic nighttime evacuation of the massive ship after it hit rocks off Giglio on January 13 and keeled over.

Other victims include Hungarian Sandor Feher, 42, who helped children into a lifeboat before heading back towards his cabin to get his violin, and Frenchman Francis Servel, 71, who gave his wife his lifejacket. She survived.

The anger of survivors has concentrated on captain Schettino, who is under house arrest at his home on the Amalfi coast and is accused by prosecutors of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship.

But Schettino’s wife defended him, saying he had become “a scapegoat”.

Crews from Dutch company Smit Salvage on the island meanwhile were looking for the best way to access the Costa Concordia’s 23 fuel tanks before syphoning all the heavy oil out in order to avert an environmental catastrophe.

Officials said the pumping was not expected to begin before Saturday and that the whole process could take weeks.

Smit will carry out a so-called “hot-tapping” operation, which involves pumping the fuel out into a nearby ship and replacing it with water so as not to affect the ship’s balance and stop it from slipping into the open sea.

The Costa Concordia went down with 4,229 people on board. It emerged Tuesday that Italian prosecutors were looking into the cruise ship operator’s possible role in the wreck and reports of a messy evacuation.

“The employer is the guarantor and is responsible. We have to look at the choices made by the operator,” Beniamino Deidda, chief prosecutor for the region where the disaster occurred, was quoted by Italian media as saying.

“For now the attention has been on the fault of the captain, who turned out to be tragically incompetent. But who chooses the captain?” Deidda asked.

The prosecutor also pointed to multiple problems with the evacuation, including a lack of preparation for the emergency among crew members.

Environmentalists warn that the human tragedy of the Costa Concordia could now be followed by an ecological catastrophe if oil spills into the pristine seas of the Tuscan archipelago in what is Europe’s largest marine sanctuary.

The head of Italy’s civil protection agency, Franco Gabrielli, who is overseeing rescue operations, said a thin oil slick measuring some 60,000 square meters (650,000 square feet) had been spotted and may have come from the ship.

Hundreds of meters of absorbent barriers have already been placed around the wreck to contain any possible oil spills. Gabrielli said there has also been some contamination of the sea from toxic substances on board.