By: Staff Writer
February 4, 2025
The Royal St. Christopher and Nevis Police force said they had found 19 decomposing bodies on board a vessel drifting off of the coast of the island of Nevis on January 29, investigations are ongoing.
The grisly discovery was made after the police were called to a strange boat drifting in the waters off of Nevis last week Wednesday. The deceased individuals are suspected to be West African migrants, but officials have not confirmed this as yet.
“It was a fishing vessel, which is not typically found in the Caribbean,” Police Commissioner James Sutton told the Associated Press of the boat. “We are not certain, but we believe that this vessel originated off the West African coast.”
Investigators said that they believe the vessel had been drifting for a long period of time because the bodies were in the advanced stages of decomposition. Police also determined that all of the deceased passengers had died before the boat drifted into St. Kitts and Nevis waters, per the press release.
Sutton said officials now face the difficult task of determining the exact number of bodies and identifying them. The advanced state of decomposition, he said, has made it difficult.
This is the first such discovery in recent memory in the twin-island nation.
In August, forensic authorities in the Dominican Republic worked to identify the remains of at least 14 mostly decomposed bodies found on an abandoned vessel 10 nautical miles of its northern coast. The Dominican Republic Navy said the 14 skeletons appeared to belong to individuals from Senegal and Mauritania, according to the documentation found next to the bodies.
The captainless boat was towed to shore and an investigation opened.
On Saturday, a similar callout led to the discovery of a skiff with five dead people onboard off Trinidad and Tobago, about 1,200km (750 miles) away.
That vessel was in a poor state and sank while being towed to the island, officials said.
A Trinidadian coast guard statement noted a “striking resemblance” between the vessel found on Saturday and another discovered nearby in 2021 which contained the remains of 15 people.
It was speculated that that boat had drifted from the African coast with migrants on board.