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.

“The rock was there but it didn’t show up in the instruments I had and I went there to satisfy the manager, go there, go there,” he says.

The conversation, in a Neapolitan dialect which the transcription translates into standard Italian, was apparently taped without the knowledge of Schettino, while he was being held in custody after the accident.

A source in the prosecutor’s office said that the transcript was genuine. Schettino’s lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, did not dispute it but said his client should not be treated as a “scapegoat”.

Schettino is under house arrest, blamed for causing the accident by steering too close to shore and accused of multiple manslaughter and abandoning ship before the evacuation of more than 4,200 passengers and crew was complete.

At least 16 people died when the cruise ship struck a rock which tore a hole in its side and caused it to capsize off the Tuscan island of Giglio on January 13. Another 16 people are still unaccounted for and six bodies are as yet unidentified.

Investigators say Schettino steered the 114,500 tonne vessel to within 150 metres of the shore to perform a manoeuvre known as a “salute”, in which a ship makes a special display by sailing very close to land.

Whether or not such manoeuvres were tolerated or even encouraged by the ship’s operators is one of the key questions at issue.

In an interview last week, the company’s chief executive said ships sometimes came close to shore but only under safe conditions. According to reports in the Italian media, the practice is widespread in the cruise industry.

In another potential threat to Costa, Corriere della Sera reported Giulia Bongiorno, one of Italy’s best-known criminal lawyers, will represent around 30 passengers who are planning cases.

No comment was immediately available from Bongiorno, who represented Raffaele Sollecito when he was acquitted last year on appeal with US student Amanda Knox of murdering Briton Meredith Kercher.

The transcript published by La Repubblica also suggests Schettino abandoned ship soon after realising that the vessel was listing dangerously, in remarks which appear to contrast with other versions of how he came to leave the ship.

During questioning by magistrates, Schettino said he slipped and fell into a lifeboat but during the conversation with Fabrizio, he appears to suggest that he took a conscious decision to abandon ship.

“When I understood that the ship was listing I got on with it and got off,” he is quoted as saying.