KEVON FELMINE

Se­nior Re­porter

kevon.felmine@guardian.co.tt

All 29 peo­ple be­lieved to have been aboard the pirogue that cap­sized off Los Iros on Wednes­day have been ac­count­ed for, as res­cuers iden­ti­fied the two vic­tims and pro­vid­ed new de­tails on how the tragedy un­fold­ed.

Hunters Search and Res­cue Team cap­tain Val­lence Ramb­harat said a ver­i­fi­ca­tion ex­er­cise con­duct­ed by mem­bers of the Venezue­lan mi­grant com­mu­ni­ty con­firmed that the on­ly two peo­ple miss­ing af­ter the in­ci­dent were those whose bod­ies were re­cov­ered on the beach be­tween Wednes­day and Thurs­day.

The vic­tims have been iden­ti­fied as six-year-old Brithanny Lin­neth Yanett León Pala­cios and Ed­win Par­ra, both be­lieved to be Venezue­lan na­tion­als.

Ramb­harat said the search op­er­a­tion was called off at 5 pm on Thurs­day fol­low­ing dis­cus­sions in­volv­ing the mi­grant com­mu­ni­ty, air sup­port and coastal units.

He said the ver­i­fi­ca­tion ex­er­cise pro­vid­ed clar­i­ty af­ter ini­tial un­cer­tain­ty over the num­ber of peo­ple aboard the ves­sel and whether ad­di­tion­al pas­sen­gers re­mained miss­ing.

“We had a dis­cus­sion with the Venezue­lan mi­grant com­mu­ni­ty as well as the head of the Air Sup­port and Coastal Unit, In­spec­tor Ron­ny Ram­pal­lard, and what the com­mu­ni­ty re­port­ed was that they did a ver­i­fi­ca­tion ex­er­cise yes­ter­day, and of the 29 per­sons who were on board, two were miss­ing, and those two were con­firmed as the two per­sons whose bod­ies were found on the beach be­tween Wednes­day and Thurs­day,” Ramb­harat said.

The iden­ti­ty of Par­ra was con­firmed af­ter a Trinida­di­an con­tact­ed Ramb­harat and said he had vis­it­ed the San Fer­nan­do Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal to iden­ti­fy the body on be­half of the vic­tim’s rel­a­tives in Venezuela.

The lat­est in­for­ma­tion from sur­vivors has al­so pro­vid­ed res­cuers with an ac­count of what may have caused the pirogue to over­turn.

Ramb­harat said one sur­vivor re­port­ed that the ves­sel’s en­gines failed short­ly af­ter it was pushed in­to the wa­ter, leav­ing it with­out propul­sion in rough seas.

The in­ci­dent oc­curred about 100 feet off­shore, he said.

Ramb­harat said the rough sea con­di­tions com­pound­ed the sit­u­a­tion, but the fact that 27 peo­ple sur­vived sug­gest­ed the ves­sel over­turned close enough to shore for many pas­sen­gers to es­cape.

He sus­pects the two vic­tims may have suf­fered in­juries dur­ing the cap­siz­ing be­fore drown­ing, al­though he stressed that this was his as­sess­ment and not an of­fi­cial med­ical find­ing.

In­ves­ti­ga­tions are con­tin­u­ing, with au­thor­i­ties await­ing of­fi­cial au­top­sy re­sults as they work to de­ter­mine the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the deaths and the events that led to the ves­sel cap­siz­ing.