Captain Francesco Schettino, the man accused of causing the deadly wreck of a cruise ship off the coast of Italy, is out of jail and under house arrest, as additional bodies were found aboard the capsized ship. NBC's Michelle Kosinski reports.
By msnbc.com and news services
Updated at 11:40 a.m. ET:?The Costa Concordia took a nearly identical route past Giglio Island in August to the one Friday that led to the sinking of the ship, NBC News has learned.
Adam Smallman, editor of shipping magazine Lloyd?s List, said the route taken in August, based on satellite tracking, was ?authorized by the company and the coast guard.?
"Our assessment of the route this vessel took (in August) is it must?have come perilously close, and?I mean possibly within touching distance of the rock that it hit this time ... which the company is saying wholly unauthorized in terms of its proximity to the island," Smallman said.
The search for missing passengers aboard the Costa Concordia is on hold over fears that the ship is shifting, making rescue efforts more dangerous.
The first victim was officially identified on Wednesday as Sandor Feher, a 38-year-old violinist from Hungary working aboard the ship. Hungarian ministry spokesman Jozsef Toth said the body was found inside the wreck and identified by his mother in the Italian city of Grosetto.
Jozsef Balog, a pianist who worked with Feher, told the Budapest newspaper Blikk that Feher was wearing a lifejacket when he decided to return to his cabin to pack his violin. Feher was last seen on deck en route to a lifeboat. According to Balog, Feher helped put lifejackets on several crying children before returning to his cabin.
DigitalGlobe
The Costa Concordia ran aground Jan. 13 off the coast of Italy, resulting in the evacuation of thousands of passengers as the ship began heavily listing.
The captain in charge of the specialist divers searching the stricken Costa Concordia tells NBC News that they need to blow four more holes in it to gain access to the bottom of the cruise ship. Asked about the search for bodies -- some 23 people are unaccounted for according to Reuters -- the captain said there was visual evidence suggesting some bodies were at the bottom of the sea.
NBC News, citing officials involved in the rescue effort,?reported that on Wednesday the ship had sunk 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) at the front and 1 meter (3.2 feet) at the back, raising concerns that the vessel may break up in the middle.
The coast guard is monitoring shifts with sensors installed by divers at the start of the rescue mission, and that movement is its main concern as it could trap divers. By late afternoon, officials still did not have enough data to reassure them that the ship had stopped resettling.
"The visibility is awful. Yesterday I couldn't see my hand in front of my face," Giuseppe Minciotti, director of a school for cave divers in the northern city of Verona and part of the specialist team deployed on the wreck, told Reuters.
"I grabbed a piece of floating debris, and I couldn't see what it was until I had my head out of the water. It was a woman's shoe," he said.? "We're waiting today for new openings to be made, and we'll see if the visibility is any better in those points."
Jim Fee, a yacht skipper for three decades, discusses the potential ecological problems related to the Costa Concordia disaster. NBC's Harry Smith reports.
Coast guard spokesman Cosimo Nicastro said work would focus on an evacuation assembly area on the partially submerged fourth deck, where most of the 11 bodies found so far have been located.
"It's where we have already found seven of the bodies and it's where the passengers and crew gathered to abandon ship," Nicastro said.
Fire services spokesman Luca Cari said the search was suspended at about 8 a.m. local time (11 p.m. ET) after a shift of a few inches, posing a potential threat to diving teams operating in the submerged spaces of the ship.
There was no word on when work might resume.?
The Costa Concordia had more than 4,200 passengers and crew on board when it slammed into a reef Friday off the tiny Tuscan island of Giglio after Capt. Francesco Schettino made an unauthorized maneuver from the ship's programmed course ? allegedly to show off the luxury liner to the island's residents.
Rescue workers discovered five bodies on Tuesday, bringing the death toll of the Costa Concordia accident to 11.?
The adult bodies, believed to be passengers, were all wearing life jackets and were found in the rear of the ship near an emergency evacuation point, according to Nicastro.
Schettino, whose actions during the disaster have come under intense scrutiny as details of his role on the night of the disaster emerge, appeared before a judge in Grosseto, Tuscany,?where he was questioned for three hours. Schettino remains under house arrest.
During a heated conversation the Italian coast guard told the captain of the Costa Concordia to go back to the ship. NBC's Michelle Kosinski reports.
Schettino's lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, said urine and hair samples have been taken from Schettino, apparently to determine if he might have consumed alcohol or used drugs before the accident.
Leporatti also told a news conference in Grosetto that house arrest made sense given there was no evidence the captain intended to flee. He cited the fact that the captain coordinated the evacuation from the shore after leaving the ship.
"He never left the scene," Leporatti said. "There has never been a danger of flight."
Leporatti added the captain was upset by the accident, contrary to depictions in the Italian media that he did not appear to show regret.
"He is a deeply shaken man, not only for the loss of his ship, which for a captain is a grave thing, but above all for what happened and the loss of human life," the lawyer said.
Martino Pellegrino, a crew-member on Costa Concordia, described Schettino as "authoritarian," "stubborn" and "egocentric," in an?interview with Italian newspaper La Republica on Tuesday.
"Schettino likes to be in control of the ship's wheel," he told the newspaper.
Also on Tuesday, a transcript of a conversation between Schettino and Capt. Gregorio De Falco of the Italian coast guard in Livorno, showed the coast guard official urgently commanding the captain to return to the cruise ship after he had abandoned it.
"There are people trapped on board," De Falco said. "Now you go with your boat under the prow on the starboard side. There is a pilot ladder. You will climb that ladder and go on board. You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear? I'm recording this conversation, Cmdr. Schettino ..."
Passengers continued to make their way home, with consistent claims that crew members were ill-prepared to handle an emergency evacuation.
"The crew members had no specialized training ? the security man doubled as the cook and bartender, so obviously they did not know what to do," passenger Claudia Fehlandt told Chile's Channel 7 television after being embraced by relatives at Santiago's airport.
"In fact, the lifeboats, even the ones that did get lowered, they did not know how to lower them and they cut the ropes with axes," she said.
Msnbc.com staff, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Source: http://overheadbin.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/01/18/10179794-rescuers-fear-cruise-ship-will-break-in-two
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