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Twenty-nine missing in Italian cruise disaster, authorities say

GIGLIO, Italy — Twenty-nine people were still missing Monday in the Italian cruise ship disaster, Italy’s coast guard said.

“An hour ago I received a report from the [local] Grosseto administration that 29 people remain unaccounted for,” coast guard chief Marco Brusco said on Italian television, revising upward an earlier estimate of about 16.

Among the missing is a couple from Minnesota.

Family members issued a statement Monday confirming that Barbara and Jerry Heil of White Bear Lake, a suburb of St. Paul, are the two Americans missing.

PHOTOS: CRUISE SHIP RUNS AGROUND IN ITALY

MINNESOTA COUPLE AMONG THOSE MISSING

The statement says the family is working closely with the U.S. Embassy in Italy and that they are confident “everything is being done to find our parents.”

A family spokesman gave the statement to The Associated Press outside the home of Aaron Heil, a son of the couple, in Albertville, a Minneapolis suburb.

Sarah Heil, a daughter of the couple, told WBBM radio in Chicago that her retired parents were on a 16-day trip.

Rescue operations were suspended for several hours Monday after the Costa Concordia shifted in rough seas and fears mounted that any further movement could cause some of the 500,000 gallons of fuel on board to leak into the pristine waters off the island of Giglio that are a protected dolphin sanctuary.

Fire department chief Alfio Pini said rescue operations resumed after the waters calmed and would continue, safety permitting, as long as there remained hope of finding people alive.

The confirmed death toll rose to six after searchers found the body of a male passenger wearing a life vest in the corridor of the above-water portion of the ship. Sixteen people are unaccounted for, including two American passengers.

Chances that they would be found alive three days after the ship was speared by the reef and toppled to one side grew slimmer.

The Concordia’s captain, Francesco Schettino, was arrested and jailed early Saturday, a few hours after Friday’s night shipwreck a few hundred yards off Giglio, a tiny island of fishermen and tourist hotels near the Tuscan coast in west central Italy.

A new report on the disaster says that captain Schettino did not respond to an order to return on board to oversee rescue operations, according to a taped telephone conversation.

ANSA news agency said Francesco Schettino, captain of the Costa Concordia, was evasive when ordered by a port official to supervise the rescue hours after the disaster Friday while several hundred people were still trapped on board.

“Now you go to the bow, you climb up the emergency ladder and coordinate the evacuation,” the official tells him, according to the transcript of the conversation recorded on one of the ship’s “black boxes.”

“You must tell us how many people, children, women and passengers are there and the exact number of each category,” he said.

“What are you doing? Are you abandoning the rescue? Captain, this is an order, I am the one in charge now. You have declared abandoning ship,” he said, adding, “There are already bodies.”

“How many?” Schettino says, prompting the cutting reply, “That is for you to tell me, what are you doing? Do you want to go home?”

Prosecutors who are investigating the captain for manslaughter, abandoning ship and causing a shipwreck stepped up their scathing criticism of his conduct.

“We are struck by the unscrupulousness of the reckless maneuver that the commander of the Costa Concordia made near the island of Giglio,” prosecutor Francesco Verusio told reporters. “It was inexcusable.”

A judge on Tuesday is expected to decide if the captain should be charged and remain jailed in Grosseto on the mainland.

Costa Crociere SpA chairman and CEO Pier Luigi Foschi said the company would provide him legal assistance, but he disassociated Costa from his behavior, saying it broke all rules and regulations.

“Capt. Schettino took an initiative of his own will which is contrary to our written rules of conduct,” Foschi said in his first public comments since the grounding.

At a news conference in Genoa, the company’s home base, Foschi said that Costa ships have their routes programmed, and alarms go off when they deviate. Those alarms are disabled if the ship’s course is manually altered, he said.

“This route was put in correctly upon departure from Civitavecchia,” Foschi said, referring to the port outside Rome. “The fact that it left from this course is due solely to a maneuver by the commander that was unapproved, unauthorized and unknown to Costa.”

Foschi didn’t respond directly to prosecutors’ and passengers’ accusations that Schettino abandoned ship before all passengers had been evacuated, but he suggested his conduct wasn’t as bad in the hours of the evacuation as has been portrayed. He didn’t elaborate.

The Italian coast guard says Schettino defied their entreaties for him to return to his ship as the chaotic evacuation of the 4,200 people aboard was in full progress. After the ship’s tilt put many life rafts out of service, helicopters had to pluck to safety dozens of people remaining aboard, hours after Schettino was seen leaving the vessel.

The captain has insisted in an interview before his jailing that he stayed with the vessel to the end.

Foschi defended the conduct of the crew, while acknowledging that passengers had described a chaotic evacuation where crew members consistently downplayed the seriousness of the situation as the nearly 1,000 foot-long ship lurched to the side.

“All our crew members behaved like heroes. All of them,” he said.

Costa owner Carnival Corp. estimated that preliminary losses from having the Concordia out of operation for at least through 2012 would be between $85 million and $95 million, though it said there would be other costs as well. The company’s share price slumped more than 16 percent Monday.

Why the ship sailed so close to the dangerous reefs and rocks that jut off Giglio’s eastern coast is not clear, but there have been suspicions the captain may have ventured too close while carrying out a maneuver to entertain islanders and passengers.

Residents of Giglio said they had never seen the Concordia, which makes a weekly Mediterranean cruise that passes the Tuscan coast, come so close to the dangerous reef area near the southern tip of the island.

Foschi said only once before had the company approved a navigational “fly by” of this sort — last year on the night of Aug. 9-10. In that case, the port and company had approved it.

With AP and Newscore