Mystery of the blond on the bridge
Former ballerina denies dining, drinking with captain shortly before accident
META DI SORRENTO, Italy — The captain of the Costa Concordia was apparently drinking and dining with a young blond woman just before his vessel ran aground off the island of Giglio, it emerged Thursday.
Domnica Cemortan, a cruise ship passenger representative and former ballerina, was also reported to have been on the bridge with Francesco Schettino on the night of the disaster. Thursday, several passengers claimed they saw Schettino and woman resembling Cemortan sharing a decanter of red wine shortly before the accident.
Investigators want to interview the 25- year- old as they believe she may be able to shed light on what happened when the cruise liner collided with a rocky outcrop off Giglio and capsized, leading to the loss of at least 11 lives.
Schettino, 52, who is under house arrest in Meta di Sorrento near Naples, is accused of sailing too close to the island to give a “salute” to an old friend and his head waiter’s family, and of later abandoning ship when hundreds of his passengers were still on board. He has denied abandoning ship, contending he was pitched in the water when the ship heeled over.
The Italian media Thursday claimed Cemortan had been invited on to the bridge of the Concordia on the night of the accident. She was said to have been there at the moment of impact as the captain prepared to conduct a spectacular “sailpast” of Giglio Island
Cemortan admitted Thursday that she had been on the bridge with Schettino, who has a wife and daughter, but insisted it was not until after the collision, when it is thought she may have been called on to help make announcements to the passengers in Russian.
“I was on the bridge at 11: 50 p. m. and he was there,” Cemortan, who has dual Moldovan and Romanian citizenship, told the Moldovan newspaper Adevarul ( Truth). She denied dining with Schettino. She said she was dining with friends at the time of the disaster.
“The charges you hear about the captain today are absurd,” Cemortan said, calling Schettino a “hero.”
Cemortan said she worked for the cruise company on other ships and had boarded the Costa Concordia to celebrate her 25th birthday with friends.
But passengers suggested the pair had been enjoying dinner together just half an hour before the Concordia careered into rocks and suffered a catastrophic gash in its hull.
An Italian couple, Angelo Fabbri and his wife Eleonora Rossi, inadvertently photographed the couple at 8: 44 p. m. as they took pictures of the dishes served to them in the Club Concordia restaurant. “Schettino, in a dark uniform, was seated in front of the woman,” Fabbri, from Savona in northern Italy, told an Italian newspaper.
“She seemed young, first of all we thought she might be his daughter. They were laughing, they seemed very happy. There’s no doubt that they drank the whole decanter, the last drops were poured into the captain’s wine glass.”
The captain reportedly left the restaurant with the woman and the officer at 9: 05 p. m., 37 minutes before the collision. He has insisted to investigators that he did not drink alcohol that night.