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Two Koreans, Italian Rescued from Italy Cruise Disaster

Two South Korean honeymooners and an Italian man were rescued Sunday from a cruise ship wreck on an Italian island as emergency crews searched frantically for dozens more missing.

Rescuers said the painstaking search in the half-submerged ship was a dangerous operation because the decks were at almost a 90-degree angle and there was a danger that the ship could slip off the rocks it had struck and sink altogether.

"We've rescued him," a coast guard official said of the man, an Italian officer responsible for passenger security on the vessel, after rescuers spent hours trying to reach him after hearing his voice echoing in the monster ship.

The official said the rescued man had suffered a broken leg.

The Costa Concordia hit submerged rocks just off the island of Giglio late on Friday, with more than 4,200 people onboard.

Two French passengers and one Peruvian crew member have been confirmed killed, apparently after jumping into the chilly Mediterranean waters with dozens of others in a chaotic evacuation.

Luca Carli told AFP that the Italian man had been stranded in the exposed part of the ship and said that the rescue was "very, very complicated."

He said the South Korean honeymooners had been evacuated by helicopter and were in "perfect condition."

"They were in their cabin, we still don't understand why," he added.

Daniele, one of around 20 army divers at the scene, told AFP as he worked on his oxygen tanks in Giglio harbor: "We've just started searching in the submerged part of the ship. It will take a long time."

"This is our job. We're experts in recovering bodies from submarines and shipwrecks. We've been briefed on the layout of the ship and all the cabin doors can be opened with a hydraulic mechanism," he said.

"It's very possible there are air pockets in the submerged part," he added.

Cosimo Nicastro, a spokesman for the coast guard, told reporters that dozens were still missing although he declined to give a precise figure.

Nicastro said some survivors may not have been counted properly but that others could have been trapped in their cabins or in other areas below deck.

Investigators arrested the ship's captain on Saturday and were to begin analyzing the "black box" recovered by rescuers, which logged all of the 291-meter long ship's movements as well as conversations between personnel.

The captain, Francesco Schettino, told Italian news channel TGCOM that the ship hit a rock that was not on the charts and that he had tried to save as many people as possible.

First officer Ciro Ambrosio was also arrested, local prosecutors said.

Italian media said the two face possible charges of multiple homicide and abandoning the ship before all the passengers were rescued.

The captain "approached Giglio Island in a very awkward way, hit a rock that stuck into its left side, making (the boat) list and take on a huge amount of water in the space of two or three minutes," a prosecutor told reporters.

Island residents also said the ship was sailing far too close to Giglio and had hit an underwater rocky reef that was well known to the residents of the picturesque hilly outcrop, which has a population of just 800.

Rescuers said they plucked 100 people from the sea overnight Friday after some of the lifeboats on board failed to function or could not descend to the water from a ship that was already badly listing.

About 60 people who had not managed to escape in lifeboats were rescued from the vessel itself, including one passenger with a broken leg.

Some crew members familiar with the layout of the ship were helping divers negotiate their way around the Italian-built liner's 1,500 cabins.

Survivors from around the world -- many with bloodshot eyes and draped in blankets in Giglio harbor -- spoke Saturday of scenes "like the Titanic" on board and said they were not properly informed about the evacuation.

Some of them were in evening wear as they had just been settling down to dinner on board when the accident happened. There were also bar and restaurant staff in crimson blazers and kitchen staff in white smocks.

Officials said all the survivors had been taken off the island on Saturday to nearby Porto Santo Stefano and then on to other parts of Italy or back home.

The people on board included some 60 nationalities and 52 of the passengers were children under six. Nearly a third of the passengers were Italian, followed by Germans and French.

Foreign diplomats privately expressed frustration over a lack of information about their citizens and on the handling of the ship's evacuation.

At least 42 people were injured, including two seriously -- a woman with a blow to the head and a man struck in the spine, medical sources said.

Most of those hospitalized had suffered broken limbs or had hypothermia.

The disaster happened just hours after the ship had left the port of Civitavecchia near Rome at the start of a Mediterranean cruise that was meant to take it to Savona in northwest Italy and then on to Marseille and Barcelona.

The Genoa-based owner of the ship, Costa Crociere, is Europe's biggest cruise operator, with a turnover of 2.9 billion euros ($3.7 billion) in 2010.

Source: Agence France Presse


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