Cruise Ship Captain “Chicken of the Sea” Guilty of Murder 13?
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Published at 10:40 a.m. ET: GIGLIO, Italy — Unregistered passengers might have been aboard the stricken cruise liner that capsized off this Tuscan island, a top rescue official said Sunday, raising the possibility that the number of missing might be higher than the 20 previously announced.
Divers, meanwhile, pulled out a woman’s body from the capsized Costa Concordia on Sunday, raising to 13 the number of people dead in the Jan. 13 accident. Italian Coast Guard divers on Saturday found a woman’s body in a corridor of a submerged section of the ship.
Civil protection official Francesca Maffini told reporters the victim found on Sunday was wearing a life vest and was found in the rear of a submerged portion of a ship by a team of fire department divers. The unidentified body was being removed from the ship.
Earlier, Italian authorities raised the possibility that the real number of the missing was unknown because some unregistered passengers might have been aboard. As of Sunday, 19 people are listed as missing, but that number could be higher.
“There could have been X persons who we don’t know about who were inside, who were clandestine” passengers aboard the ship, Franco Gabrielli, the national civil protection official in charge of the rescue effort, told reporters at a briefing on the island of Giglio, where the ship, with 4,200 people aboard rammed a reef and sliced open its hull on Jan. 13 before turning over on its side.
Gabrielli said that relatives of a Hungarian woman have told Italian authorities that she had telephoned them from aboard the ship and that they haven’t heard from her since the accident. He said it was possible that a woman’s body pulled from the wreckage by divers on Saturday might be that of the unregistered passenger.
But in addition to the body recovered on Sunday, the body found on Saturday and those of three men found a few days earlier, have yet to be identified, because the corpses were badly decomposed after so much time in the water. Gabrielli said they have identified the other eight bodies: four French, an Italian, a Hungarian, a German and a Spanish national.
Until Sunday, authorities had said that 20 people are still missing.
Holding out hope
Meanwhile, family members of a couple from the state of Minnesota still missing after last week’s cruise ship wreck say they’ve been meeting in Italy with rescue workers.
In an email statement sent Saturday night to news organizations, relatives of Jerry and Barbara Heil say the captain in charge of the operation indicated he wasn’t ready to give up hope that the missing can be found.
The family members say they and relatives of others missing from the Costa Concordia accident were taken out near the ship and allowed to place flowers in the water honoring their loved ones. They say the workers stopped what they were doing and saluted during the tribute.
The captain of the cruise ship told magistrates he informed the ship’s owners of the accident immediately, denying he had delayed raising the alarm, judicial sources said on Saturday.
Schettino has been blamed for causing the accident. He is under house arrest, accused of multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning ship before all passengers were evacuated.
His statements to prosecutors investigating the disaster, reported in the Italian press and confirmed by judicial sources, underline the growing battle between him and Costa Cruise Lines which operates the 114,500 ton vessel.
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