Po­lice of­fi­cers are seek­ing the as­sis­tance of In­ter­pol in iden­ti­fy­ing the 14 de­com­pos­ing bod­ies and hu­man re­mains found on a boat adrift off the coast of Belle Gar­den, To­ba­go, in May.

Mean­while, the For­eign Af­fairs Min­istry is await­ing feed­back from au­thor­i­ties in Mau­ri­ta­nia and Mali, where those on the boat are be­lieved to have orig­i­nat­ed.

Min­is­ter of For­eign Af­fairs Amery Browne yes­ter­day con­firmed the min­istry had re­cent­ly con­tact­ed au­thor­i­ties in both coun­tries on the mat­ter, af­ter po­lice asked them to as­sist.

Po­lice of­fi­cers in To­ba­go al­so con­firmed the move to seek In­ter­pol’s help soon af­ter doc­u­ments were sub­mit­ted to that agency this week.

Lo­cal po­lice con­clud­ed the ves­sel to be from Mau­ri­ta­nia, af­ter an in­spec­tion on the boat un­cov­ered sev­en mo­bile phones and for­eign cur­ren­cy among the corpses.

Po­lice said the phones had in­for­ma­tion per­tain­ing to the West African coun­tries of Mau­ri­ta­nia and Mali. The bod­ies re­main at the To­ba­go morgue and the ves­sel un­der guard.

The boat, which drift­ed to To­ba­go, has now be­come part of the his­to­ry of so-called “ghost boats” car­ry­ing mi­grants from African coun­tries which have been lost along the Ca­nary Route, known for treach­er­ous cur­rents.

The boat which was adrift off To­ba­go, was re­port­ed on The Ca­nary web­site in a June ar­ti­cle, ti­tled “Ghost Boats: A Mau­ri­tan­ian cayu­co (ca­noe) in the Caribbean high­lights those lost on The Ca­nary Route.”

The ar­ti­cle stat­ed, “There has not been a month in re­cent times dur­ing which one or two ves­sels have not dis­ap­peared from Mau­ri­ta­nia on this route, of which noth­ing more has been heard in more than a year.

“In most cas­es, these boats dis­ap­pear with­out a trace, cap­size, break up and are swal­lowed by the ocean. But, some­times, rarely, the trade winds and the cur­rents that make up the great ocean­ic churn man­age to car­ry an in­tact cayu­co to the Amer­i­c­as, drift­ing the same route Christo­pher Colum­bus in­au­gu­rat­ed in 1492: from the Ca­nary Is­lands to the Caribbean sea.”

The ar­ti­cle added that in Tener­ife (Por­tu­gal), 24 re­cent graves, with anony­mous tomb­stones, were ev­i­dence of the fate of one group of mi­grants.

“It is a dan­ger to which the thou­sands of young Africans who at­tempt to trav­el the Ca­nary Route, to­wards some Eu­ro­pean dream, sub­ject them­selves in flim­sy fish­ing ves­sels, to end up ex­posed to the harsh re­al­i­ties of the ocean: where death by thirst, sur­round­ed by wa­ter, is still all too com­mon.”

The ar­ti­cle al­so not­ed that a ca­noe was found drift­ing off Bar­ba­dos in May 2006. It left for the Ca­nary Is­lands from Cape Verde, car­ry­ing 47 young Sene­galese, at the end of 2005.

Eleven de­com­posed bod­ies were re­cov­ered from the ves­sel.