Manrico Giampedroni was rescued from Italian cruise ship after breaking leg and getting trapped
An Italian officer dramatically rescued after being trapped on board the stricken cruise ship Costa Concordia said he had refused to give up hope while waiting for help.
"I never lost hope of being saved. It was a 36-hour nightmare," said ship's purser Manrico Giampedroni, 57, who was found as rescue teams probed the dark, cold corridors of the partially-submerged vessel, emboldened after finding a South Korean couple alive on Saturday night.
As the search of the enormous cruise ship continued, Giampedroni emerged as one of the few heroes of the tragedy, amid reports that the captain and other crew members panicked and got into lifeboats ahead of passengers.
Giampedroni, who joined the cruise company aged 18, had helped load passengers into lifeboats before setting off to search the decks for more passengers at around midnight, his mother said after speaking to him.
But as the ship took on water and began to list and thousands of passengers swam or were flown or ferried to land, Giampedroni slipped, broke a leg and became trapped. Alone and close to the rising waters as the ship heeled over in the darkness, Giampedroni called for help which only arrived 36 hours later after rescuers several decks away heard his voice.
"As soon as I heard I cried," said his mother, Giovanna Lazzarini, 78, after he had been airlifted to hospital. "And to speak to him again was like being reborn. If they had told me he was dead I would have died too."
Hours earlier, at 1.30am on Sunday, rescuers had traced cries for help to cabin No 838, where they found newlyweds Hye Jim Jeong and Kideok Han, who had chosen the Mediterranean cruise for their honeymoon, boarding at Civitavecchia less than three hours before the ship went aground.
"We heard you, but we could not make ourselves heard," they told rescuers after being taken off the ship, wrapped in thermal blankets and smiling. "Then finally you found us."
Two elderly men found dead on board the vessel on Sunday were named as Italian Giovanni Masia and Spaniard Gual Guillermo, bringing the number of confirmed deaths to five.
Masia, 84, had been celebrating a rare holiday on the Costa Concordia when he was separated from his wife after they were plunged into darkness during dinner as the ship hit rocks. His son Claudio, who was also on board with his family, got his mother, wife and children into a lifeboat before searching in vain for his father.
Relatives of the other 15 passengers and crew still missing remained on tenterhooks as divers and rescue teams continued their search.
Two of those unaccounted for are American, the US embassy in Rome said.
An Italian man from Rimini, aged 30, and his daughter, five, were also missing, reported Corriere della Sera. The man was separated from his partner as they tried to board a lifeboat. She made it ashore but has not seen him or his daughter since.
Another Italian man said that the last time he had seen his wife, Maria D'Introna, 30, she was leaping into the sea with a lifejacket to attempt the short swim to the rocky coast of Giglio.
As families waited for news, fresh accounts emerged of the chaotic scenes after disaster struck. Passengers had just sat down to dinner, a few hours after leaving Civitavecchia, when a loud bang interrupted the piano player, and the ship began to list.
It was initially announced that there had been an electrical fault, and waiters told diners to remain seated.
"We heard a loud rumble, the glasses and plates fell from the tables, the ship tilted and the lights went off," passenger Luciano Castro told Reuters. "What followed was scenes of panic, people screaming, running around the place. Close to us a five-month pregnant young woman was crying and panicking."
Survivors alleged that panicked crew members did little to help as the Costa Concordia's 3,206 passengers tried to abandon the listing ship.
"They were incompetent," said Giuseppe Lanzafame, 42, a former sailor who was on board with his wife and two daughters. "They made us stay on deck for an hour and a half without telling us anything. I saw immediately the lack of preparation of the crew members, who didn't know how to lower the lifeboats. Many didn't know how to communicate with us because they did not speak Italian or English," he said.
"At one point I had to explain to one of them how to manoeuvre the lifeboat and I had to take charge of it because they didn't know what to do and were more scared than we were," he added.
Another passenger, Francesco Frontera, said: "The crew, who were mostly Indians, Filipinos, and Sri Lankans, had no thought for saving the old, the children and the disabled. They just ran to be first on the lifeboats."
Coastguard chief Cosimo Nicastro said that divers had broken submerged windows to enter the flooded sections of the vessel, but swirling curtains and loose floor tiles were making divers' work harder and more dangerous.
Italian police earlier confirmed that two French passengers and a Peruvian crew member died, and about 30 people were reported injured, three of them critically. William Hague, the foreign secretary, said that all 25 British passengers and 12 British crew on board had survived.
Italian media pointed out that the Costa Concordia was destined for bad luck: at her launch in 2006, attended by the model Eva Herzigová, the bottle slung against the hull failed to smash.