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January 16th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda
A French couple who boarded the Concordia in Marseilles, Ophelie Gondelle and
David Du Pays, told the Associated Press they saw the captain in a lifeboat,
covered by a blanket, well before all the passengers were off the ship.
“The commander left before and was on the dock before everyone was off,”
said Gondelle, 28, a French military officer.
“Normally the commander should only leave at the end,” said Du
Pays, a police officer who said he helped an injured passenger to a rescue
boat. “I did what I could.”
Coast Guard officers later spotted Schettino on land as the evacuation
unfolded. The officers urged him to return to his ship and honour his duty
to stay aboard until everyone was safely off the vessel, but he ignored
them, Coast Guard Cmdr. Francesco Paolillo said.
Schettino insisted he didn’t leave the liner early, telling Mediaset
television that he had done everything he could to save lives. “We were
the last ones to leave the ship,” he said.
Questions also swirled about why the ship had navigated so close to the
dangerous reefs and rocks that jut out off Giglio’s eastern coast, amid
suspicions the captain may have ventured too close while carrying out a
manoeuvre to entertain tourists on the island.
The ship’s owner, Costa Crociere SpA, issued a statement late Sunday saying it “seems
that the captain made errors of judgment that had very grave consequences.
The route the ship followed turned out to be too close to the coast, and it
seems that his decision in handling the emergency didn’t follow Costa
Crociere’s procedures, which are in line, and in some cases, go beyond,
international standards.”
Residents of Giglio said they had never seen the Costa come so close to the
dangerous “Le Scole” reef area.
“This was too close, too close,” said Italo Arienti, a 54-year-old
sailor who has worked on the Maregigilo ferry between Giglio and the
mainland for more than a decade. Pointing to a nautical map, he drew his
finger along the path the ship usually takes and the jarring one close to
shore that it followed Friday.
The ship was a mere 150 yards from shore at the time of the grounding, ANSA
quoted Grosseto prosecutor Francesco Verusio as saying.
Schettino insisted he was twice as far out and said the ship ran aground
because the rocks weren’t marked on his nautical charts.
However, he did concede he was manoeuvring the ship in “touristic
navigation” – implying a route that was a deviation from the norm and
designed to entertain the tourists.
“We were navigating approximately 300 meters (yards) from the rocks,”
he told Mediaset television. “There shouldn’t have been such a rock. On
the nautical chart it indicated that there was water deep below.”
Costa captains have occasionally steered the ship near port and sounded the
siren in a special salute, Arienti said. Such a nautical “fly-by”
was staged last August, prompting the town’s mayor to send a note of thanks
to the commander for the treat it provided tourists who flock to the island,
local news portal GiglioNews.it reported.
But Arienti and other residents said even on those occasions, the cruise ship
always stayed far offshore, well beyond the reach of the “Le Scole”
reefs.
“Every so often they would do a greeting, but not so close – far away,
safely,” said resident Giacomo Dannipale.
Douglas Ward, a cruise expert and author of the 2012 Berlitz guide to cruises,
said the waters around Giglio are too shallow for such manoeuvres.
Jorgen Loren, chairman of the Swedish Maritime Officer’s Association, said the
captain clearly deviated from the ship’s intended route.
It is remarkable because weather conditions were good and these cruise ships
have the best and most modern technical equipment. All conditions were ideal,”
he said.
“These are well-known waters, ferries pass here every day going back and
forward to the mainland,” he said.
Coast Guard Cmdr. Filippo Marini said divers had recovered the so-called “black
box,” with the recording of the navigational details, from a
compartment now under water, though no details were released.
Meanwhile, rescue work continued into the night on the unsubmerged half of the
Concordia, said firefighters spokesman Luca Cari. Sniffer dogs were being
brought in, although it was unclear if they could adapt to working in an
environment where the horizontal became the vertical, due to the 90 degree
list of the ship.
Marini, the coast guard captain, held out hope there could still be survivors,
perhaps holed up in the half of the Concordia still above water, or that
some of the unaccounted passengers simply didn’t report their safe arrival
on land.
Earlier Sunday, a helicopter airlifted a cabin crew member from the capsized
hulk just hours after South Korean honeymooners were rescued from their
cabin when firefighters heard their screams.
A relative of the rescued crewman told reporters he had survived two nights in
darkness and with his feet in water.
Besides the two dead discovered Sunday, the bodies of three other victims –
two French passengers and a Peruvian crewman – were pulled out of the sea in
the hours after the accident.
The terrifying escape from the luxury liner was straight out of a scene from “Titanic.”
Many passengers complained the crew didn’t give them good directions on how
to evacuate and once the emergency became clear, delayed lowering the
lifeboats until the ship was listing too heavily for many to be released.
“We were left to ourselves,” pregnant French passenger Isabelle
Mougin, who injured her ankle in the scramble, told the ANSA news agency.
Another French passenger, Jeanne Marie de Champs, said that faced with the
chaotic scene at the lifeboats, she decided to take her chances swimming to
shore.
“I was afraid I wouldn’t make the shore, but then I saw we were close
enough, I felt calmer,” she told Sky News 24.
A coast guard diver from Genoa, Majko Aidone, interviewed by Sky TG24 TV after
emerging from his dive, explained that the first task, after gaining access
to a submerged space through openings, or after smashing through glass, is
to tie down large floating objects, like mattresses, which could turn into
dangerous obstacles.
Then, in hopes of alerting any survivors to their presence, “we make
noise,” he said.
Crews in dinghies climbed on board the exposed hull of the ship and touched
it, near the exposed site of the 160-foot-long gash where water flooded in
and caused the ship to fall on its side.
Earlier Sunday, at a Mass held in Giglio’s main church, which opened its doors
to the evacuees Friday night. altar boys and girls brought up a life vest, a
rope, a rescue helmet, a plastic tarp and some bread.
Don Lorenzo, the parish priest, told the faithful that he wanted to make this
admittedly “different” offering to God as a memory of the tragedy.
“Our community, our island will never be the same,” he told the
islanders gathered for the Mass.
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