A member of the crew of the the Costa Concordia cruise liner, which capsized off the coast of Tuscany in Italy last Saturday, has rescued over 500 passengers.

"I did six runs with a lifeboat which holds 150 people. It was full the first three times, but the next runs were lighter because most passengers were already on the shore. This was not a tragedy; we all were just doing our jobs," the Bulgarian-born first engineer of the liner, Petar Petrov, says, cited by the Bulgarian news agency "Focus."

Petrov further informs he was taking a shower when he felt a shock. Immediately after that he followed rules and regulations on how to act in case of an incident and went to the command board.

"After I checked the diesel generator, I realized that things were turning critical – the ship leaned on one side; I saw water coming through the entrance of the machine room and flooding deck 0. I was pinned to the wall by a crowd of passengers trying to reach the lifeboats after sensing the ship was sinking," the man explained.

According to official reports of the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry, eight Bulgarian citizens, were on board of the Costa Concordia cruise ship. Donka Todorova, a Bulgarian woman who lives in Italy, was the only passenger; the other seven were male members of the crew.

3 200 passengers and 1 023 crew members were on board at the time of the incident.

The luxury Costa Concordia ship ran aground in shallows some 300 meters away from the Tuscany Giglio Island. This led to a capsizing of the large vessel, after a 70 meter hole formed in the body of the ship, filling it with water.

The captain of the ship was arrested and charged with the murder of more than one person.

The death toll reached 6 on Monday.

Meanwhile, the Head of the Varna-based company Komak, which had worked for years with the Italian Costa, informed that another 2-3 Bulgarian women were likely to have been working on the liner as maids. They have been sent there through a company from Ruse in 2007, before Bulgaria's joining of the EU. The company was later closed, but the Bulgarians stayed there and signed contracts directly with the Italian owners.