Concordia captain in safety seminar at Italian university

A furious row has broken out within Italy's biggest university after it emerged that Francesco Schettino, the former skipper of the Costa Concordia, had been invited to address a seminar organised by one of its professors.

Schettino, who is on trial charged with manslaughter and other offences, was quoted as saying: “I was called in because I am an expert. I had to illustrate the management of panic control.”

Thirty-two people died amid chaotic scenes after the giant liner smashed into a rock off the island of Giglio on the night of January 23th, 2012. A diver later died during the salvage operation.

The Florence daily La Nazione reported that Schettino spoke for almost two hours to graduate students at Sapienza University in Rome.

In a statement, the university confirmed that the former Concordia skipper had participated in a seminar on July 5th that formed part of a master's course in criminology and forensic science and said the university "firmly condemned" the initiative, adding that the rector had referred the organiser, Prof Vincenzo Mastronardi, to the ethics committee for an assessment and possible disciplinary action.

The university added that the rector, Luigi Frati, had phoned the professor and accused him of offering “pathetic excuses”. But Mastronardi said the event had not been held on Sapienza premises and denied it was part of a master’s course. It was instead a seminar reserved for experts that included a three-dimensional reconstruction of the disaster, he said.

The professor told the Italian news agency AGI: “It was not my idea to invite Schettino. It was he, on learning of the initiative, who contacted us through his lawyers, asking to have the opportunity to take part in the interests of balance.

“He knew that experts were to talk about the shipwreck and he feared that their versions could damage his defence. I certainly underestimated the consequences of the thing, but there is no doubt that from a scientific standpoint, the point of view of someone who took part in that tragic event was definitely interesting.”

The wrecking of the Concordia is a subject of immense sensitivity in Italy, where it is widely regarded as a source of shame. Schettino also faces charges of causing a maritime disaster and abandoning ship before the evacuation of its 4,252 passengers and crew had been completed.

The disaster took place at a time when Italy’s economy had deteriorated amid the euro zone crisis. As the cost of its huge public borrowings soared to near-unsustainable levels, images of the stricken liner were widely presented as symbolic of national failure.

Last month, following one of the costliest and most complex salvage operations ever mounted, the rusting hulk of the Concordia was successfully towed across the Mediterranean to Genoa where it is to be broken up for scrap.

Speaking to La Nazione, Schettino claimed he had been given an “academic recognition” for his contribution to the seminar. “Apart from anything else, I have sailed every sea in the world,” he was quoted as saying. “I know how people behave in these cases [and] how you need to react when there are crew members of different ethnicities.”

He reportedly told the paper that studies had been conducted comparing the wrecking of the Concordia with other disasters. Among the questions raised was: "Why, during the attack on the twin towers, were there people who threw themselves out of the windows [whereas] during the foundering of the Concordia no one did anything similar?"

– (Guardian service)