Gail Alexan­der

Deep­er analy­sis will have to be done on the hu­man re­mains from the Mau­ri­tan­ian ves­sel found drift­ing off To­ba­go al­most two weeks ago, since re­cent post mortems were in­con­clu­sive.

Po­lice in To­ba­go con­firmed the sit­u­a­tion yes­ter­day fol­low­ing the post mortems last week

The ves­sel was found drift­ing by To­ba­go fish­er­men

It’s ori­gin was the Is­lam­ic Re­pub­lic of Mau­ri­ta­nia in North West Africa and it was be­lieved to have been stolen.

Four­teen sets of re­mains in ad­vanced state of de­com­po­si­tion, in­clud­ing three re­duced to bones, were found.

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 el­e­ments.

The ves­sel was towed to Belle Gar­den.

Au­thor­i­ties were un­clear re­cent­ly if the de­ceased were Mau­ri­tan­ian cit­i­zens and had hoped to get fin­ger­prints from ca­dav­ers to se­cure iden­ti­ty.

But af­ter post mortems were in­con­clu­sive, in­clud­ing on cause of death, deep­er analy­sis/tox­i­col­o­gy will have to be done.

There have been rum­blings among some in To­ba­go that the boat should be burnt. Po­lice said that was not their call and the boat may be re­turned to own­ers when in­for­ma­tion aris­es.

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

In March, 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.

Mi­grants seek­ing to reach the US are be­ing trapped at Nicaragua’s south­ern bor­der, prompt­ing some to choose mar­itime routes.