Miami, July 29 (EFE) Fifteen people were killed after a boat carrying some 200 Haitian migrants capsized near the Turks and Caicos Islands, the US Coast Guard said.
About 70 people were missing in the incident and 118 passengers were rescued by the coast guard.
“The rescued people are in stable condition and, according to information we have up to now, nobody suffered serious injuries,” a Coast Guard spokesman in Miami, Barry Bena, said.
Bena said authorities think there were between 160 and 200 people in the boat, “but we don’t known exactly because some Haitians have said they stopped at different places to pick up others.”
Neil Hall, chief of the maritime police for Turks and Caicos, said, meanwhile, that they are trying to rescue more survivors, “but it will probably just be a case of recovering more bodies.”
Hall’s department called the shipwreck one “of the worst maritime tragedies” that had ever occurred in his country.
The boat, reported to be 9-15 metres long, hit the Molasses reef, some three kilometers southeast of West Caicos, apparently on Monday afternoon, Bena said.
In May, another boat with close to 30 Haitians shipwrecked off West Palm Beach on the east coast of Florida killing nine people.
