Captain ‘pressured to sail by island’

The captain of the doomed Italian liner Costa Concordia said he was told by managers to take his ship close to shore on the night it ran aground and capsized, according to bugged conversations leaked in Italian newspapers.

La Repubblica published transcripts of a conversation Captain Francesco Schettino had with a person identified only as Fabrizio in which he implicates an unnamed manager of the vessel’s owners Costa Cruises.

“Fabri... anyone else in my place wouldn’t have been so nice as to go there because they were breaking my balls, saying go there, go there,” Schettino says in the conversation, taped while he was being held following his arrest over the incident.