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11 dead, dozens rescued after migrant boat capsizes near Puerto Rico
A makeshift boat overloaded with migrants capsized Thursday on its way to Puerto Rico, officials said, leaving at least 11 people dead as dozens more were rescued.
“We’re hoping to find additional survivors,” Ricardo Castrodad, a spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard’s San Juan sector, said Thursday night. “But it could go both ways.” He said it is not clear how many people were on the packed boat. Crews did not see any life jackets, he added.
A Customs and Border Protection air crew spotted people in the water around noon, officials said. Authorities said the boat was found about 10 nautical miles north of Desecheo Island — a patch of land in the Mona Passage, the strait between Puerto Rico and the Caribbean island that includes the Dominican Republic and Haiti.
The vessel is “suspected of taking part in an illegal voyage,” the Coast Guard said in a news release. An increasing number of migrants have made similar treacherous journeys by sea, fleeing countries where the coronavirus pandemic has exacerbated long-standing problems of poverty and violence.
Thirty-one survivors — 11 women and 20 men — were taken to Crash Boat Beach in Aguadilla, a town in northwestern Puerto Rico, said Jeffrey Quiñones, a regional spokesman for Customs and Border Protection. He said the boat departed from the Dominican Republic but added that only two survivors are from that country.
Those rescued include eight Haitians who were transported to a hospital in Aguadilla, Quiñones said.
Betsy Rivera, spokeswoman for Puerto Rico’s Institute of Forensic Sciences, said the agency received 11 bodies, after initially saying 13. It did not yet have identities or nationalities for the deceased. Autopsies will take place Friday, and the agency hopes to extract DNA to identify the dead.
The institute has been in touch with the Dominican Human Rights Committee, an organization it typically contacts in these types of incidents to help identify family members on the neighboring island.
