Second body found after migrant boat incident at Los Iros

SASCHA WIL­SON

Se­nior Re­porter

A sec­ond body has been re­cov­ered fol­low­ing an in­ci­dent in­volv­ing a boat car­ry­ing mi­grants off Los Iros Beach, Erin yes­ter­day.

Po­lice said the body of a male was found float­ing near the shore­line around 2pm af­ter re­ports that a pirogue car­ry­ing sev­er­al peo­ple crashed in­to rocks and over­turned while head­ing to­wards the beach.

The dis­cov­ery comes af­ter the body of a five-year-old girl washed ashore at Los Iros ear­li­er on Wednes­day.

Hunters Search and Res­cue Team cap­tain Val­lence Ramb­harat con­firmed that his team lo­cat­ed the child’s body on a rocky sec­tion of the shore­line af­ter re­ceiv­ing in­for­ma­tion that an over­loaded pirogue car­ry­ing about 20 to 30 Venezue­lan na­tion­als had left Trinidad for Venezuela.

Guardian Me­dia un­der­stands the ves­sel, which was al­so car­ry­ing car­go, may have de­vel­oped en­gine prob­lems short­ly af­ter leav­ing Trinidad and To­ba­go’s shores.

Po­lice said based on in­for­ma­tion re­ceived, around 1pm on Wednes­day the pirogue struck a rock, caus­ing it to flip and throw per­sons over­board. The oc­cu­pants lat­er re-en­tered the ves­sel and sailed away from Los Iros Beach.

The male body re­cov­ered by the Trinidad and To­ba­go Coast Guard was brought ashore and ap­peared un­re­spon­sive.

Po­lice de­scribed the de­ceased as a fair-skinned male with short black hair and a medi­um build. He was found wear­ing grey sweat­pants and had no vis­i­ble marks of vi­o­lence.

A Dis­trict Med­ical Of­fi­cer pro­nounced the man dead and or­dered the body’s re­moval to the San Fer­nan­do Mor­tu­ary pend­ing a post-mortem ex­am­i­na­tion.

Dur­ing drone search­es of the Los Iros coast­line, the Air Sup­port Unit al­so found a red suit­case par­tial­ly soaked on the shore­line. Po­lice said it con­tained male, fe­male and chil­dren’s cloth­ing, along with a pic­ture frame con­tain­ing pho­tographs of three fe­males.

Po­lice and Coast Guard per­son­nel con­tin­ued search­es of the area as re­ports in­di­cate that two adults re­main un­ac­count­ed for.