Costa Concordia officials 'knew cruise liner had technical problems days before it capsized'

London, July 4 (ANI): Senior officials of the capsized Costa Concordia knew the luxury cruise liner had been sailing with technical problems for several days before it crashed onto rocks off the Italian coast in January, it has emerged.

According to correspondence acquired by investigators, problems with the Concordia's black box voyage data recorder (VDR) emerged on 9 January.

In one of a series of emails in the days before the disaster, Costa Cruises' technical director Pierfrancesco Ferro told a repair firm that the 'VDR has broken down for the umpteenth time, and the situation is becoming unbearable.'

Costa Cruises, however, said the VDR 'had only issued an error code'.

"This in no way meant that the device was out of service, as is demonstrated by the fact that the data it contained were perfectly in line with engineers' expectations," it said."There is no international regulation or convention that prohibits a ship from sailing in a similar situation," it added.

Codacons, the Italian consumer group that is leading a class action against Costa Cruises, disagreed, the Daily Mail reports.

"The bottom line is that the ship should never have set sail that in condition," the paper quotd Codacons' president Carlo Rienzo, as saying.

Codacons is also claiming that electrical problems may have contributed directly to the deaths of several passengers who are thought to have died in the stricken vessel's lifts.

Costa Cruise has denied claims of crucial failures in the ship's Martec electrical control system leading to problems with the lifts, blackouts and difficulty in closing doors that should have been sealed.

According to the paper, the raft of damaging allegations, leaked by Italian magistrates, also suggested the main sealed doors were not closed properly and that unauthorised sea charts were in use by the crew when the vessel ran aground on 13 January this year with over 4,000 passengers and crew aboard. (ANI)