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COSTA CONCORDIA CAPTAIN Francesco Schettino has told an Italian court that he was showing off when he steered the cruise ship onto rocks off the Italian island of Giglio.
But he denied that the person he was most trying to impress was a blonde Moldovan dancer nearly 20 years his junior who was with him on the bridge at the time.
The January 2012 disaster resulted in the death of 32 passengers and crew.
Testifying for the first time in his trial for manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship, Schettino presented himself as a captain who had been badly briefed by his crew about the disastrous route the 115,000-tonne vessel was fixed on when he returned to the bridge after dinner.
On the sidelines of the hearing, prosecutor Francesco Verusio revealed he was planning to request a 20-year prison term for the captain.
Schettino, 54, told the court that it was normal “commercial” practice to navigate close to the coast to impress passengers.
On this occasion, he also wanted to “salute” a retired colleague living on Giglio and the ship’s head waiter, who came from the island.
“I was trying to catch three pigeons with one bean,” Schettino, said, using an Italian expression that translates as “killing three birds with one stone”.
Just chatting
At the moment he resumed control of the boat, he believed it to be fixed on a safe route which would take it past Giglio on a line 0.5 miles offshore. “If the crew had any doubt about that, they should have told me.”
Asked why he had asked the coastguard “is there water at 0.3 miles?”, Schettino replied: “I was just making conversation.”
The captain denied taking a reckless risk to impress Domnica Cemortan, with whom he had just dined.
An employee of Costa, the Moldovan dancer was on the ship as an unauthorised passenger. She has testified that she was having an affair with the married captain.
Wearing a grey suit and aviator-style sunglasses, the man dubbed “Captain Coward” had appeared pensive as he arrived at a theatre in the Tuscan town of Grosetto which is being used as a temporary courtroom.
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But he testified confidently in his first appearance in the trial which began in July 2013, using colourful language in the broad accent of his home city, Napoli.
Recordings played in court from the “black box” voice recorder on the ship’s bridge appeared to indicate that he had no idea of how much danger the ship was in. Just minutes before disaster struck, the captain is heard ordering a change of direction before joking in English: “Otherwise we go on the rocks.”
Schettino giving evidence at a Grosseto courthouse. AP / Press Association Images
AP / Press Association Images / Press Association Images
‘What have I done?’
In the final sentence of the recording, after the crash, Schettino is heard to say: “Madonna, what have I done?”
The Concordia, twice the size of the Titanic, was moving at a brisk 16 knots and had 4,229 people from 70 countries on board when it struck the rocks at 9.45 pm.
Holed below its waterline on impact, the giant vessel ended up half-submerged on the sea-bed on its starboard side.
Schettino’s employers have accused him of making an “unapproved and unauthorised” deviation from the ship’s set route.
He is also accused of recklessly delaying the evacuation order until after it was clear the ship was going down — a charge the captain dismissed in court.
Abandoned ship
Schettino’s ignominious reputation is largely based on his conduct after the crash.
Only 29 minutes after he had given the order to passengers and crew to evacuate, and with lifeboats still dotting the surrounding waters, Schettino himself left the vessel with hundreds of those onboard still unaccounted for.
He later rebuffed a furious coastguard officer’s order that he return out of respect for both the law and centuries-old sailors’ code.
The cross-examination of Schettino will continue Wednesday.
@Crocodylus Pontifex: normally you can’t prevent them marching- not one to the Chinese embassy in last two years Spend some time with us at Orwell Road too
@diarmuid: don’t see the relevance, but glad to hear that Ireland is making €38m off software and technology as an industry. If not us then it would be someone else
The western media have won the day….war has come in one door as truth and reason fled out the other..NATO…who have worked hard for this moment …wine and dine with the arms salesmen…
Russia treats Ukraine in the same way the USA treats Cuba. It is the equivalent of Ireland to Russia. The invasion has to be opposed. Putin’s war of aggression has damaged us all. Aside for economic consequences, it could lead to a world war.
@Jim Monaghan: Do you remember the Cuba crisis where America threatened Nuclear war if Russia didn’t get out of Cuba.
Russia now doesn’t want NATO, US with bases in Ukraine.
@Roger Bond: that’s because the USSR had placed and threatened to place, nuclear arms facilities on thr Island of cuba, so its not the same, not by a long shot
@Disco Inferno: the USSR was placing nuclear weapons in Cuba because the US had placed them in Turkey. So it was tit for tat only the US weren’t going to have any tat and instead threatened all out war. Russia’s anxiety regarding Ukraines potential membership of NATO is that the US will place missile systems, which they have already placed in other NATO countries, which are capable of neutralising Russia’s nuclear deterrent and therefore unbalancing the MAD status quo. Their reasoning is sound but their actions are appalling. But the world has a history of powerful countries acting appallingly simply because they can. There are other countries with whom we are closely aligned who have acted in the exact same manner but do not receive our condemnation. The wests hypocrisy is also appalling
@Roger Bond: do you? Remember the Cuban missile crisis or is it something you’ve just read about in your schoolbooks so you “know” about it! History is different if you’ve lived through it to what shows up in books 40 or 50 years later when the hindsight is 20/20 and everyone has died….
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