Rescue workers pluck couple and crew member from liner
STRUGGLE TO FIND THOSE STILL TRAPPED ON BOARD CAPSIZED VESSEL
Giglio, I t al y ( Agencies) A South Korean honeymoon couple and an injured crew member were plucked from a capsized Italian liner yesterday, more than a day after it was wrecked, as rescue workers struggled to find any others still trapped on board.
After midnight, rescue workers found t he two South Koreans still alive in a cabin, after locating them from several decks above, and brought them ashore looking dazed but unharmed.
At about 1 pm rescue workers airlifted Manrico Gianpetroni, chief purser, hours after making voice contact with him several decks below.
Gianpetroni, who had a broken leg, was lifted from the ship on a stretcher by a helicopter and taken directly to hospital.
“I never lost hope of being saved. It was a 36-hour nightmare,” he said. Teams were painstakingly checking thousands of cabins on the Costa Concordia for people still unaccounted for after the huge vessel foundered and keeled over with more than 4,000 on board, killing at least three people and in- juring 70. The number of people still missing from the Italian cruise ship disaster has gone down to 17, Tuscan regional president Enrico Rossi said yesterday.
Grosseto governor Giuseppe Linardi said of- ficials compared the ship’s manifest against a list compiled at the port of Santo Stefano where rescue operations are based.
Misspelled
“There are a lot of foreigners, and it’s possible t hat names were misspelled,” he said.
Grosseto prosecutor Francesco Verusio has conf i rmed allegations f rom passengers and others that the captain of the cruise ship abandoned the stricken liner before all the passengers had left. Captain Francesco Schettino was detained for questioning for suspected manslaughter, abandoning ship before all others and causing a shipwreck.
As the search continued, there were demands for explanations of why the vessel had come so close to the shore and bitter complaints about how long it took to evacuate the passengers.
Verusio said investigations might go beyond the captain. The vessel’s operator, Costa Crociere, a unit of Carnival Corp & Plc, said the vessel had been sailing on its regular course when it struck a submerged rock.