Italy liner death toll rises to 13 as woman’s body found

Italy: Divers found a woman's body in the Costa Concordia cruise wreck off the coast of Italy on Sunday, raising the death toll to 13, as families of the missing attended a remembrance mass.

“Divers from the fire services found the body of a woman at deck seven at the stern of the ship, in the area underwater. She was wearing a life-jacket,” spokeswoman Francesca Maffini from the Civil Protection Agency said.

Divers had carried out a search in previously inaccessible parts of the ship below the water line, after the rescue mission was called off temporarily overnight because the perilously beached vessel had shifted in the water.

The head of Italy's protection agency, Franco Gabrielli, had said earlier on Sunday that divers were looking for 20 people officially missing, but said that there may have been people on board who were not on crew or passengers lists. Relatives of a Hungarian woman have claimed she rang them from the ship, but authorities have no official record that she was on board, he said.

Families waiting for news of missing loved ones attended a special remembrance mass on Sunday.

“This is a moment for hope, trust and faith,” Priest Lorenzo Pasquotti, who sheltered passengers in the St Lorenzo church in the hours after the disaster.

“Nothing happens for no reason. Those who are suffering can share their burden with God,” he said, telling the relatives of missing French and Peruvian victims that they should not give up hope.

“I think everybody needed a moment to just pull together and take a breath, and remember that in all the chaos of the search for survivors, people died that night,” said local Sabrina Grazini, who attended the mass.

Nine days after the luxury Costa Concordia crashed into rocks off Giglio Island with 4,229 people from 60 countries on board, fresh reports on the cause of the tragedy emerged.

The ship's captain, Francesco Schettino, is under house arrest and is being investigated for multiple manslaughter, abandoning ship and causing a shipwreck, after he steered the boat too close to the Tuscan island.

He has confessed to having sailed near the island to “salute” its residents.

In excerpts from a 135-page statement he gave to Italian prosecutors published in the Italian media on Sunday, Schettino said he had performed the “salute” many times and had done it to give the island publicity.

AFP