BASSETERRE — Authorities in the eastern Caribbean nation of St. Kitts and Nevis said they are investigating the circumstances that led to the discovery of at least 19 bodies found drifting at sea.
At around 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday the St. Kitts and Nevis Coast Guard responded to a report of a drifting vessel off the coast of Nevis.
The partially submerged boat contained decomposed human remains. It was towed to St. Kitts, where police and medical officials are conducting investigations.
“It was a fishing vessel, which is not typically found in the Caribbean,” Police Commissioner James Sutton told The Associated Press. “We are not certain, but we believe that this vessel originated off the West African coast.”
Sutton said officials now face the difficult task of determining the exact number of bodies and identifying them. The advanced state of decomposition, he said, has made it difficult.
This is the first such discovery in recent memory in the twin-island nation.
Mauritania – a possible departure point
On Saturday, a similar alert led to the discovery of a vessel with five dead people onboard off Trinidad and Tobago, around 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) away, the Guardian newspaper reported.
The vessel, which was in a poor state and sank while being towed to the island, showed a “striking resemblance” between the vessel found on Saturday and another discovered nearby in 2021 which contained the remains of 15 people, the Guardian reported, citing the Trinidadian coast guard.
In May 2021, fishermen found the decomposing bodies of more than a dozen men inside a vessel off the island of Tobago. 135 days prior to the discovery, 43 people were believed to have left a port city across the ocean from the African continent, and tried to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, but never arrived. Instead, they turned up in Tobago, according to the AP investigation, which reported that the vessel was registered in the northwestern African country of Mauritania, nearly 4,800 kilometers (3,000 miles) away.
“Evidence found on the boat — and its style and color as a typical Mauritanian “pirogue” — suggested the dead were likely African migrants who were trying to reach Europe but got lost in the Atlantic,” the AP report found.
Africa’s ‘ghost boats’
In 2021, at least seven boats, believed to have originated from northwest Africa, washed ashore in the Caribbean and Brazil — each carrying deceased passengers.
Stricter migration controls in the Mediterranean Sea, combined with factors like the economic fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, have driven migrants to seek alternative routes. Many have turned to the far longer, less monitored, and significantly more dangerous Atlantic passage from northwest Africa to Europe via the Canary Islands instead, with some unlucky vessels ending up as far as the Caribbean and South America and becoming so-called “ghost boats.”
