5 more bodies found on capsized cruise ship: reports
Posted January 17, 2012 6:49 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Rescue squads used controlled explosions on Tuesday to enter a stricken Italian cruise liner in the increasingly despairing hunt for survivors as authorities almost doubled their estimate of the number missing to 24 people.
Five more bodies were found on the vessel, according to Italian media reports, raising the death toll to 11.
The two explosions were carried out early on Tuesday morning to allow firefighters and scuba divers to enter parts of the ship that they had not yet been able to search.
The weather improved slightly from Monday but seas were still choppy.
The giant cruise liner slid a little on Monday, threatening to pour 2,300 tonnes of fuel below the Mediterranean waters of the surrounding nature reserve.
The slippage forced rescuers to suspend efforts to find anyone still alive after three days in the capsized hull, resting on a jagged slope outside the picturesque harbour on the island of Giglio. Most of the 4,200 passengers and crew survived, despite hours of chaos.
An Italian coast guard official said that 10 Germans were thought to be among the missing passengers.
The 114,500-tonne Costa Concordia, one of the biggest passenger vessels ever to be wrecked, foundered after striking a rock just as dinner was being served on Friday night. It quickly rolled on its side, revealing a long gouge below the waterline.
The captain of the ship is due to be questioned by prosecutors in the town of Grosseto on Tuesday.
The ship’s owners accuse captain Francesco Schettino of causing the disaster by veering the ship too close to shore, where it hit a rock, in a bravura “salute” to residents of a Tuscan island off Italy’s Mediterranean coast.
Schettino was arrested on Saturday accused of manslaughter and abandoning the ship before all people were evacuated, and he was due to appear before magistrates for questioning on Tuesday morning.
Prosecutors say Schettino also refused to go back on board when requested by the coastguard.
Click here to listen to a recorded conservation between the Italian coastguard and the captain. To read a transcript of their discussion, click here.
Investigators say the ship was much too close to the shore and its owners, Costa Cruises, said the captain had carried out the rash manoeuvre to “make a bow” to people on Giglio island, who included a retired Italian admiral.
Schettino denies charges of manslaughter.
His lawyer issued a statement saying the skipper was “broken up, troubled and saddened by the loss of life”. But he believed he had saved many lives by carrying out a difficult emergency manoeuvre with anchors after the accident, which turned the ship closer to the shore.
The father of the ship’s head waiter told Reuters that his son had telephoned him before the accident to say the crew would salute him by blowing the ship’s whistle as they passed close by Giglio, where both the waiter, Antonello Tievoli, and his 82-year-old father Giuseppe live.
Costa Cruises chief executive Pier Luigi Foschi on Monday said company vessels were forbidden to come closer than 500 metres to the Giglio coast.
Investigators say the liner, designed as a floating pleasure palace for over 3,000 customers, was about 150 metres offshore when it hit the rocks that tore a long gouge in its thousand-foot hull.
Schettino denies being too close to the coast and says the rock he hit was not marked on charts.
