Captain blames helmsman as Costa Concordia trail resumes in Italy
Helmsman failed to follow orders just before ship hit rocks, claims defendant
Francesco Schettino, captain of Italy's doomed Costa Concordia cruise ship, yesterday denied he was responsible for the accident that killed 32 people and blamed the Indonesian helmsman.
"I wanted to slow the ship down. But the helmsman did not follow my orders correctly," Schettino told a court in the Italian city of Grosseto, where the trial against him for manslaughter and abandoning ship resumed after a summer recess.
"He steered in the wrong direction and we crashed," he said, accusing the helmsman, Jacob Rusli Bin, of making a mistake that caused a fatal delay in changing the ship's course.
Schettino said: "If it weren't for the delay and the mistake ... the ship would have stopped," he added.
Schettino, dubbed "Italy's most hated man" by the tabloids, has been accused of sailing too fast and too close to the island in a risky manoeuvre to "salute" the residents, an Italian maritime tradition.
His defence team asked permission yesterday for experts to go aboard the recently raised wreckage to determine whether technical problems contributed to the disaster.