Engineers have started to lift the wrecked Costa Concordia upright off Italy's Tuscan coast, a salvage operation said to be one of the most complex and costly ever attempted.
The vast hulk of the 290-meter-long and 36-meter-wide cruise liner has lain on its side for more than 20 months off the Giglio Island, west of Italy, where it hit rocks on January 13, 2012, and killed 32 people.
Engineers using remote controls will guide a synchronized leverage system of pulleys and counterweights to delicately nudge the ship free from its rocky seabed perch.
The operation, expected to last up to 12 hours, has cost more than 600 million euros and could cost more than 1 billion dollars in the end.