RHON­DOR DOWLAT

One of 14 bod­ies in an ad­vanced state of de­com­po­si­tion that was found in a pirogue drift­ing in To­ba­go wa­ters has been iden­ti­fied.

Po­lice sources said that ac­cord­ing to re­sults from DNA test­ing, one of the bod­ies has been iden­ti­fied as Alas­sane Sow. The con­fir­ma­tion came last week Wednes­day.

In­ves­ti­gat­ing of­fi­cers ex­plained that be­cause the ves­sel was ini­tial­ly iden­ti­fied, Mau­ri­tan­ian gov­ern­ment of­fi­cials here con­tact­ed of­fi­cials from that coun­try and were able to get sam­ples from rel­a­tives of peo­ple who were re­port­ed as miss­ing in Mau­ri­ta­nia.

Of the sam­ples they got for DNA test­ing, on­ly one came back pos­i­tive.

Po­lice said the ves­sel's ori­gin was from the Is­lam­ic Re­pub­lic of Mau­ri­ta­nia in North West Africa and it was be­lieved to have been stolen.

Cur­ren­cy in the form of Eu­ros and Swiss francs were al­so found along with a GPS and cell phones with phone num­bers.

These were in wa­ter­proof bags, un­dam­aged by the el­e­ments.

The ves­sel was towed to Belle Gar­den on May 28, 2021 af­ter it was re­trieved by po­lice of­fi­cers, coast guard and the bod­ies re­moved and sent to the Scar­bor­ough mor­tu­ary.

Ini­tial au­top­sies done on the bod­ies were in­con­clu­sive, in­clud­ing the cause of death and there­fore deep­er analy­sis/tox­i­col­o­gy was trig­gered and need­ed to be done.

The Mau­ri­tan­ian ves­sel is the sec­ond from Africa found drift­ing in the Caribbean with bod­ies.

In March 2021, Nicaraguan au­thor­i­ties found six bod­ies in a boat drift­ing off Nicaragua’s coast.

A pass­port from the Re­pub­lic of Guinea, West Africa was found.

The corpses were bad­ly de­com­posed and an ini­tial ex­am­i­na­tion in­di­cat­ed all ap­par­ent­ly died of de­hy­dra­tion or heat­stroke.