GIGLIO, Italy - New evidence emerged yesterday that suggested that the captain of the Costa Concordia had been repeatedly ordered by superiors to deviate from its course on Jan. 13 and head toward picturesque Giglio Island off the Tuscan coast, where the 950-foot luxury cruise liner crashed and partly sank.
In leaked telephone transcripts of the captain’s conversations with an unidentified official from Costa Cruises, recorded while the captain was in police custody after escaping the shipwreck, he is heard saying Costa Cruises managers had insisted on the changed course and that “anyone else in my place wouldn’t have been so nice as to go there.’’
The claims by the captain, Francesco Schettino, 51, have been challenged by Costa Cruises, a subsidiary of the Carnival Corp., which is the world’s largest cruise ship company.
Costa Cruises, the ship’s operator, has insisted that it did not authorize the detour and has called Schettino the main culprit.
Evidence supporting either account could have an important bearing on criminal and civil actions over the shipwreck and chaotic evacuation, which left at least 16 people dead and some 19 unaccounted for among the more than 4,200 passengers and crew.
Officials identified three more of the recovered bodies yesterday, all of them German.