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| Costa Concordia owners are facing a multimillion-pound lawsuit from more than 100 passengers |
Official death toll currently stands at twelve, with twenty individuals missing once the cruise liner hit rocks off the coast of Italy.The body of a girl has been found on board the capsized cruise liner Costa Concordia, bringing the confirmed death toll to twelve.The woman, who was sporting a life jacket, was found by divers during a corridor on the fourth deck of the Costa Concordia, said coastguard commander, Cosimo Nicastro.The body was delivered to Giglio, the Tuscan island where the liner hit a reef and ran aground on fourteen January. Twenty individuals are missing.The discovery came because it emerged that the house owners of the stricken ship face a multimillion-pound lawsuit from quite a hundred passengers, and fears grew of a developing environmental disaster caused by leaking fuel.
Two US law companies and Italy's shopper association Codacons told the BBC they'd be filing a suit against Costa Cruises on behalf of the crash victims within the next week.Each of the one hundred ten claimants can reportedly be seeking a minimum of £100,000 in damages, with some inquiring for 2 or 3 times the minimum claim.
Costa Cruises, that is owned by the US-based Carnival cluster, has blamed captain, Francesco Schettino, for last week's disaster.The ship hit rocks off the coast of the Tuscan island of Giglio with quite four,200 individuals on board every week ago.The company accused Schettino of committing "grave errors of judgment" by steering the ship too near Giglio on an "unauthorised manoeuvre".
Schettino is currently beneath house arrest suspected of manslaughter, that he denies.But Mitchell Proner, a lawyer with US firm Proner & Proner, told the BBC that the house owners couldn't pin all responsibility for the disaster on a "rogue captain".
"It's straightforward to mention this captain acted alone," he said.
"There are indications that there are regular route deviations within the past. There ought to are safeguards on board, where were the alarms?
"At the time of the Titanic it'd are straightforward to mention that radars did not exist. Nowadays, with all the technology, it isn't. There had to be a failure within the system that allowed this to happen."
He said Proner & Proner in association with Codacons would file a lawsuit in Miami by Wednesday.Passengers would be seeking compensation for ongoing medical care, loss of earnings also because the psychological impact they'd suffered whereas attempting to flee the sinking ship, he added. Twenty individuals stay missing.
As the seek for survivors resumed on Saturday, Italian coastguard officers said diesel, apparently from machinery aboard the ship, had been found within the ocean nearby.But coastguard spokesman Nicastro said there was no indication that any of the nearly 0.5 1,000,000 gallons of significant fuel oil within the cruiser's double-bottomed tanks had leaked.
He described the diesel within the ocean as "very lightweight, terribly superficial" and seemingly beneath management."We should not forget that on that ship there are oils, solvents, detergents, everything that a town of 4 thousand individuals desires," said the top of Italy's civil protection agency, Franco Gabrielli, who is leading the rescue, search and anti-pollution efforts.
Boats equipped with machinery to get rid of the oil from the ocean were being deployed, Italian officers told Italian TV.
