A cook aboard cruise liner Costa Concordia has claimed that the captain 'ordered dinner' even as chaos was breaking out after the ship crashed on the shores of Tuscany.
The number of missing in the accident has been revised upward to 29.
"The captain wanted us to cook for him around ten or ten thirty, and I saw him with a woman we did not recognize. I asked the other cook, Jason Velasco, what the captain was thinking. That time, everything was falling apart, including our cooking. I couldn't believe what was happening," Britain's The Telegraph quoted cook Rogelio Barista as saying.
Barista's statement is the latest in a series of allegations claiming captain Francesco Schettino is 'directly responsible' for the crashing the massive ship on rocks.
The death toll has risen to six after divers found the body of a man in the early hours of Monday.
Earlier, Italian officials also released a damning report that reveals aptain Schettino did not respond to an order to return on board to versee rescue operations.
Italy's ANSA news agency said the 17-deck Costa Concordia's skipper was evasive when ordered by a port official to supervise the rescue hours after the ship keeled over on Friday and several hundreds were still trapped.
"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'.
'Are you abandoning ship?'
"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?"
Earlier, Schettino had compromised himself by saying in another telephone call that we 'cannot get on board because the rear of the ship is keeling over'.
ANSA also said there was a kind of 'mutiny' among the crew which decided on an evacuation before being given formal orders by the captain.
Schettino was arrested on Saturday along with first officer Ciro Ambrosio.
The head of the company, which owns the vessel said it had hit a rock as a result of an 'inexplicable' error by Schettino off the picturesque island of Giglio.
"He carried out a manoeuvre which had not been approved by us and we disassociate ourselves from such behaviour," said Pier Luigi Foschi, the boss of Costa Crociere, Europe's largest cruise operator.
Italian prosecutors accuse the two officers of multiple homicide and abandoning ship before all the passengers were rescued.
Investigators were also analysing the 'black box' recovered by rescuers for exact details of the ship's movements.
The Costa Concordia was carrying more than 4,200 people when it ran aground shortly after starting a seven-day Mediterranean cruise on its way to Marseille in France and Barcelona in Spain, just as many passengers were having dinner.
Carnival Corp, the parent company of Costa Crociere, put the initial cost of the disaster at $85-95 million (67-75 million euros).