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Family members of missing persons from the Costa Concordia cruise ship arrive on a coast guard boat at Giglio island January 22, 2012. Diving crews recovered the body of a woman aboard the ship on Saturday, bringing the death toll to at least 12.
PAUL HANNA/REUTERS Divers, meanwhile, pulled out a woman’s body from the capsized Costa Concordia on Sunday, raising to 13 the number of people dead in the Jan. 13 accident.
Civil protection official Francesca Maffini told reporters the victim was wearing a life vest and was found in the rear of a submerged portion of a ship by a team of fire department divers. The unidentified body was being removed from the ship.
Earlier, Italian authorities raised the possibility that the real number of the missing was unknown because some unregistered passengers might have been aboard.
“There could have been X persons who we don’t know about who were inside, who were clandestine” passengers aboard the ship, Franco Gabrielli, the national civil protection official in charge of the rescue effort, told reporters at a briefing on the island of Giglio, where the ship, with 4,200 people aboard rammed a reef and sliced open its hull on Jan. 13 before turning over on its side.
Gabrielli said that relatives of a Hungarian woman have told Italian authorities that she had telephoned them from aboard the ship and that they haven’t heard from her since the accident. He said it was possible that a woman’s body pulled from the wreckage by divers on Saturday might be that of the unregistered passenger.
But in addition to the body recovered on Sunday, the body found on Saturday and those of three men found a few days earlier, have yet to be identified, because the corpses were badly decomposed after so much time in the water.
Gabrielli said they have identified the other eight bodies: four French, an Italian, a Hungarian, a German and a Spanish national.
Until Sunday, authorities had said that 20 people are still missing.
The search had been halted for several hours early Sunday, after instrument readings indicated that the Concordia has shifted a bit on its precarious perch on a seabed just outside Giglio’s port. A few meters away, the sea bottom drops off suddenly, by some 20-30 metres, and if the Concordia should abruptly roll off its ledge, rescuers could be trapped inside.
When instrument data indicated the vessel had stabilized again, rescuers went back in, but only explored the above-water section and evacuation staging areas where survivors have indicated that people who did not make it into lifeboats during the chaotic evacuation could have remained.
Passengers were dining at a gala supper when the Concordia sailed close to Giglio and struck the reef, which is indicated on maritime and even tourist maps.
There are also fears that the Concordia’s double-bottom fuel tanks could rupture in case of sudden shifting, spilling 2,200 metric tons of heavy fuel into pristine sea around Giglio, which is part of a seven-island archipelago in some of the Mediterranean’s most pristine waters and a prized fishing area.
But Gabrielli said pollutants found near the ship have been detergents and other substances, including chlorine, apparently from the wreck of the ship, which carried some 3,200 passengers and a crew of 1,000. Any fuel traces found were “compatible with what you find in a port,” he said.
Ferries and cargo ships regularly call at Giglio’s port.
Sophisticated oil-removal equipment has been standing by, waiting for the search-and-rescue operations to conclude before workers can start extracting the fuel in the tanks.
The Italian captain, Francesco Schettino, is under house arrest as prosecutors investigate him for suspected manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning the ship while many were still aboard.
Operator Costa Crociere, a subsidiary of U.S.-based Carnival Cruise Lines, has said that Capt. Schettino had deviated without permission from the vessel’s route in an apparent manoeuver to sail close to the island and impress passengers.
Schettino, despite audiotapes of his defying Coast Guard orders to scramble back aboard, has denied he abandoned ship while hundreds of passengers were desperately trying to get off the capsizing vessel. He has said he coordinated the rescue from aboard a lifeboat and then from the shore.
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