Cruise ship that crashed into rocks off Italian island:

My husband saved my life before drowning - Survivor

Italy: A Costa Concordia survivor has told how her husband saved her life before drowning - because there was ‘nobody there’ to save him.

Frenchwoman Nicole Servel, 61, said Francis Servel, 71, gave her his lifejacket before they leapt off the sinking cruise ship.

She said: ‘I owe my life to my husband – it’s obvious he saved me.’ She managed to swim for shore, while Mr Servel was swept underwater and drowned.’

Speaking from her home near Toulouse, south west France, Mrs Servel recounted the terror as passengers were left in utter panic in the pitch dark, with little or no assistance from the crew.

‘He shouted: “Jump, jump, jump”. I can't swim so he gave me his life jacket.

‘I froze and couldn’t jump, but he jumped off the ship and shouted upwards ‘Come on, don't worry.

‘I jumped off and the last thing I heard him say was that I would be fine. Then I never saw him again.

‘The water was only eight degrees. When I was alone in the water I thought of my children, my grandchildren.

The thought of them kept me afloat. It kept me living. I do not know how I did it.

‘I swam for several minutes. I am unable to say exactly how long.

And then I found myself on a rock. Villagers came to pick us up.

They led us to a church. I was very cold, frozen. In the sacristy we found a cassock. I took it. It made me warm.’

Her story backs up other survivor claims that it was a case of every man, woman and child for themselves of the £390m vessel after it ran aground.

Fights broke out to get into the lifeboats, men refused to prioritise women, expectant mothers and children as they pushed themselves forward to escape. Crew ignored their passengers – leaving ‘chefs and waiters’ to help out.

A dancer who helped to direct petrified passengers off the Costa Concordia said today the instruction to abandon ship should have been given ‘an hour earlier, if not more'.

He said: ‘We had an announcement saying please stay calm, everything is under control, it's just a minor technical fault.

‘Then we had the coding of two short blasts followed by alternate tones which means there is a leak on board and so the crew were divided, very much so.

‘A lot of people said, “no just tell everyone to stay calm, that's what we've been told to say”.

‘But then other people took the initiative and said, “Okay, let's tell everyone to stay calm but hand over life jackets”.’

Mr Thomas, from Sutton Coldfield, Birmingham, said the boat eventually began to lift and tilt and he knew something was drastically wrong. Eventually the call came to abandon ship.

‘We had reached such a tilt that we couldn't deploy any more life rafts or life boats on the port side so we had to run round to the starboard side to get onto a life boat.

‘Some of us went one way, some of us went the other. Daily Mail