Captain who fled to lifeboat ordered: Go back

Italian skipper Captain Francesco Schettino was repeatedly instructed to return to his sinking ship by outraged coastguards after he apparently fled to a lifeboat while large numbers of passengers remained terrified on board the stricken liner.

The discovery of more victims yesterday took the death toll from the Mediterranean disaster to 11, with 23 last night still unaccounted for. As the search for the missing continued into the evening, Italian media published a recording of the extraordinary conversation between Capt Schettino and the port authorities after his ship hit rocks on Friday night.

Having initially told the port authorities the ship faced nothing more than a “technical problem”, the captain was later said to have claimed there were only about 40 people missing, and that he was no longer on board.

The recording of his subsequent conversation with coastguard Captain Gregorio De Falco indicated this response was met with fury – and an order he return to his ship.

“You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are,” Capt De Falco shouted. “Is that clear?”

But Schettino resisted, saying the ship was tipping and that it was dark.

Capt De Falco shouted back: “And so what? You want to go home, Schettino? It is dark and you want to go home?

“Get on that prow of the boat using the pilot ladder and tell me what can be done, how many people there are and what their needs are. Now. You go aboard. It is an order. Don’t make any more excuses. You have declared the abandoning of the ship, now I am in charge.”

Capt Schettino, 52, was finally heard agreeing to re-board, but it was unclear whether he did so.

Prosecutors have since accused him of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship before all passengers were evacuated.

He could face 12 years in prison if found to have abandoned his ship, even before any other wrongdoing is taken into account.

Capt Schettino insisted in an interview before his jailing that he stayed with the vessel to the end.

But the chairman of Costa Cruises, Pier Luigi Foschi, has blamed him for making an unauthorised deviation from the cruise’s route so that he could “make a salute”.

Pictures released yesterday taken on Friday showed terrified passengers clambering down a ladder on the side of the ship in pitch dark in a desperate bid for safety.

About 700 people were yesterday involved in the recovery operation, but hopes of finding anyone else alive have been growing slimmer by the hour.

The local police force at Grosseto said it was possible that not all those missing are still at sea, however.

“It’s possible some have returned home and not made contact,” a spokeswoman said. “There were a lot of boats bringing people from the island of Giglio to the mainland, so it might be that some people left Italy without saying ‘I’m safe’.

Earlier, Italian navy divers set off explosives to create four small openings in the hull of the cruise ship to speed the search for the missing passengers and crew.

The five bodies recovered yesterday were all those of adults wearing life jackets, and were found in the rear of the ship near an emergency evacuation point.

All are thought to have been passengers.

Earlier in the day, Italian officials released a list of the nationalities of the missing people.

There were 14 Germans, six Italians, four French, two Americans, one Hungarian, one Indian and one Peruvian still unaccounted for.

One of these was confirmed dead yesterday but had not yet been identified, police said.

The missing Italians were reported to include five-year-old Dyana Arlotti and her 34-year-old father William, from Rimini.

Meanwhile consumer rights organisation Codacon lodged a legal claim with the public prosecutor’s office at Grosseto in which they are seeking to calculate the “administrative and criminal responsibility” of Costa Crociere, the ship’s operator.

For a full transcript of the recording, visit the international news section of our website at www.yorkshirepost.co.uk.