Maurizio Degl' Innocenti/European Pressphoto Agency  Italian coast guard divers searched for survivors as rescue operations continued on the cruise ship Costa Concordia on Sunday. More Photos »  GIGLIO, Italy — Rescue workers scouring a partly sunken Italian cruise ship off the Tuscan coast found glimmers of hope and tragedy on Sunday, pulling three survivors from the stricken luxury liner, including a couple on their honeymoon, and two bodies, bringing the total confirmed dead to five.  There were still an estimated 15 peoople unaccounted for, including two Americans, from the accident on Friday, when the massive Costa Concordia struck a rocklike object and capsized. About 70 people were injured, officials said.  The police continued to investigate the crash, and were holding the ship’s captain and first officer for questioning on charges of manslaughter, failure to offer assistance and abandonment of ship, the police said.  Accounts of survivors and witnessed had raised questions about the crew’s preparedness and whether the ship had steered dangerously off course. The ship’s owner, Costa cruise company, a subsidiary of Carnival Cruise lines, said the ship was following its normal course and had followed emergency procedures.  Divers searching submerged cabins found the bodies of two elderly men, one from Spain and the other Italy, at an assembly point near a restaurant, said Cmdr. Cosimo Nicastro, a spokesman for the coast guard. Both were wearing their life jackets.  Among the people still missing, Commander Nicastro said, were nine passengers and six crew members.  Throughout the day, Italian fire brigades circled the ship, resting on its side like a beached whale with a gash just below the waterline and a rock jutting through its hull. The firefighters tapped the hull and listened for any responses from people trapped inside.  In the early morning, a couple, honeymooners from Korea, was found alive inside a cabin of the ship, said Luca Cari, a brigade spokesman, and taken to a local hospital.  Later, firefighters made a dramatic helicopter rescue, hoisting a man strapped to a stretcher up a rope. The man, who suffered a broken leg, was later identfied as a Costa purser, Manrico Giampedroni, 57, from the northwestern region of Liguria. He was taken to a nearby hospital.  Rescuers have so far searched only a quarter of the part of the ship that is above water, said Mr. Cari, the fire spokesman, adding that the sunken portion of the ship would be inspected through the porthole windows through the night.  “The likelihood that we can find somebody alive in the underwater cabins is very low, so we are aiming at the ones possibly trapped above water,” he said.  The ship had been carrying 4,200 passengers and crew on a weeklong Mediterranean cruise. Anxious survivors, many comparing the experience to the movie “Titanic,” recounted a chaotic and terrifying scene in which some crawled through hallways to escape down perilous ladders to lifeboats, while others leapt overboard into the wintry Tyrrhenian Sea.  “In a moment, everything was up in the air,” said Alessandra Grasso, 24, a passenger from Sicily. “People, chairs, glasses, food.”  Ulrike Schweda, 63, from Germany, was caught in a crowd of people pushing toward a lifeboat, and slipped on the deck. “The most terrible thing was seeing children trying to get down this ladder they had put on the side of the boat,” she said.  Two French citizens and a Peruvian crew member were reported dead, according to a hospital official in the nearby town of Grosseto, in Tuscany.  On the tiny island of Giglio (pronounced GEE-lo), many of the 900 or so residents watched the ship sink. At Sunday morning Mass, a priest at the Giglio Porto church placed a life jacket and other items on the altar, in honor of the dead and missing. “Giglio will no longer be the same,” said Don Lorenzo, the priest. “Let’s us all pray together now for our souls.”  Some residents had spent the night tending to survivors. “We just got dressed and came down to the harbor to help, at midnight,” said Leonardo Brizzi, 43, a store keeper on the island. “I gave them socks, napkins, clothes, for free. It was all I could give them.”  Gaia Pianigiani reported from from Giglio, Italy, and Sarah Maslin Nir from New York.
Rescuers made contact early Sunday with three survivors inside a luxury cruise liner that capsized off the coast of Italy, killing at least three people.