Prosecutors demand 26 years for Costa Concordia Captain who abandoned ship during disaster

Italian prosecutors have demanded a 26-year prison sentence for Costa Concordia captain Francesco Schettino for his role in the 2012 shipwreck in which at least 32 people died.

According to Mirror, in scathing closing comments, prosecutor Maria Navarro of showing no remorse over the tragedy and had still not apologised to the families of the victims or passengers who had been on board the ship.

She said that during the course of the trial, it had been proved that Schettino "thought only and always about himself" and that he had given up on trying to help stricken passengers "without even getting his shoes wet," the report said.

The luxury liner carrying 4,200 passengers hit a reef off the Italian island of Giglio two years ago and capsized, killing 32 people. It was raised from the sea in July and towed to Genoa to be scrapped.

Earlier, an Italian court has heard that a coastguard official aboard the doomed cruise liner Costa Concordia had told its captain, Francesco Schettino, to get back on the ship as he fled on a lifeboat leaving almost 300 people to die in the capsizing vessel.

The phone conversations between Commander Gregorio De Falco and Captain Schettino were played in the court which revealed that about two-and-a-half hours after the impact of the ship with the rocks, Schettino was on a lifeboat claiming that only 10 people were left on board, Sky News reports.

However, De Falco confirmed that the coastguard officials believed between two and three hundred passengers were still on the ship, when Schettino shook off his responsibility and left in a lifeboat.

The ship slowly capsized off the Italian island of Giglio, and Captain Schettino stands trial for manslaughter and abandoning ship.

De Falco also said that initially he had received assurances from officers on board that the ship had suffered a mere black-out, but later a call made to the mainland police by a passenger about the incident raised his suspicions.

The court also heard a conversation between another coastguard official and Schettino, in which the latter assured the official that he would stay on board to oversee evacuation.