Po­lice say 14 bod­ies were re­moved from a ves­sel that was found adrift off the coast of To­ba­go this morn­ing.

The fol­low­ing is a state­ment by the Po­lice Ser­vice:

“Po­lice are in­ves­ti­gat­ing the dis­cov­ery of 14 bod­ies, a skull and skele­tal re­mains, stacked in a boat which was found float­ing four miles off Belle Gar­den, To­ba­go, this morn­ing.

Ac­cord­ing to re­ports, around 6:30 am on May 28th, fish­er­men Doyle and Lance Big­gart, 48, of Pem­broke, whilst fish­ing off Belle Gar­den, spot­ted a strange ves­sel.

Up­on in­ves­ti­gat­ing, the fish­er­men found the de­com­posed bod­ies. The fish­er­men then con­tact­ed the Po­lice and the Coast Guard.

The fish­er­men pulled the ves­sel ashore at the Belle Gar­den Bay. The bod­ies, all men, were in an ad­vanced state de­com­po­si­tion. The bod­ies were even­tu­al­ly re­moved to the mor­tu­ary at the Scar­bor­ough Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal to await iden­ti­fi­ca­tion and sub­se­quent au­top­sies to de­ter­mine the caus­es of death.

Vis­it­ing the scene were ACP William Nurse, Supt Kirk, ASP Matthews, In­spec­tor Prince and of­fi­cers of Homi­cide and Char­lot­teville and Rox­bor­ough po­lice CID. The en­tire area was cor­doned off as in­ves­ti­ga­tions con­tin­ue.”