Some of the Bulgarian sailors who were among the crew of the ill-fated Italian cruise liner Costa Concordia have cast doubt on allegations that its captain Francesco Schettino was among the first to escape the ship.
 
The Bulgarians were serving in different departments in the vessel and had different perspectives on the events of the night of January 13 2012, when the 144 000-ton Costa Concordia ran aground on rocks on Italy’s north-western coast while performing a "salute" manoeuvre.
 
Schettino is under house arrest and is expected to face a number of criminal charges arising from several allegations including that he fled prematurely, leaving others to carry out the rescue. Schettino, through lawyers, has denied wrongdoing.
 
Petar Petrov, a chief mechanic on the Costa Concordia, said that the wreck was the result of a navigation error amid a complicated situation because of the shallow water.
 
He told Bulgarian National Television in a January 19 interview that he had felt ship vibrate and then tilt.

Asked if he had been frightened, Petrov said, "well, that’s normal, right, but we are sailors and we are trained to get through critical situations, that is our job".
 
He said that the crew had struggled to save the ship but it had been clear that this was impossible. "The passengers were saved, as you can see, 99 per cent survived."
 
The Costa Concordia had about 4200 people on board. Eleven have been confirmed dead and January 20 reports said that 24 were missing.
 
Asked if he had seen the captain, and when Schettino had got on the lifeboat, Petrov said that the captain certainly had not been among the first to escape "but may have been somewhere around the middle".
 
"Maybe his mistake was that he did not come back, after which maybe he was swept by the wave, I did not see how he reached the shore. But he was not among the first to escape with the passengers," Petrov said.
 
He said that the captain was on the tilted edge and could have slipped.
 
Petrov said that he had taken a lifeboat with passengers from the ship a few times. He said that he had done so as an engineer capable of keeping the lifeboat’s engine running, for the sake of the safety of those on board.
 
"And several times I saw the captain, it is fully possible for a man to slip, but after that he did not return, that is a fact, which everybody knows, but he was not among the first."

Technician Kamen Peev, asked whether he had to save people, told Bulgarian National Television "each of us had to save people, there’s no other way".
 
He said that the ship had passed that point of the route "hundreds of times" and he was certain that the wreck was because of navigational error.

Bulgarian daily Standart quoted crew member Georgi Stoev as saying that he had seen the captain "because I jumped in the last lifeboat" and, Stoev said, a lot of lies had been written about Schettino.
 
Stoev said that it was no miracle that the vast majority of passengers had survived, because the crew had followed the rules strictly and kept to their duties.