Fourteen bodies, fourteen lives adrift on a beach in Tobago, and many questions: Who were they? How had they gotten there? How did they die? This was the starting point of the investigation that Associated Press journalists Renata Brito and Felipe Dana carried out for almost two years until they discovered the story of the boat and the people who were on it and found their death instead of the new life they were looking for.
The journalists discovered that the boat, which was found on a beach near Trinidad and Tobago in May 2021, had left Mauritania months before, on the other side of the Atlantic, bound for the Canary Islands, but something went wrong and it ended up being washed away. by the Atlantic currents. “They were trying to reach Europe but, like so many others, they never made it. In most cases, the bodies of migrants who die at sea are never found and the families do not find out what happened to them,†the report narrates.
According to the article, some fishermen found the boat on the shore on May 28, 2021 and notified the authorities as soon as they realized that there were only corpses on board. From the boat they removed 14 bodies, three skulls and other human remains in poor condition due to exposure to the sun, salt and water. They recovered clothing, 1,000 West African CFA francs and half a dozen corroded mobile phones, with SIM cards from Mali and Mauritania. The remains were stored in the Trinidad Forensic Science Center morgue, where they still remain.
The AP investigation, which included interviews with dozens of family members and friends, officials and forensic experts, as well as police documents and DNA evidence, concluded that 43 young men from Mauritania, Mali, Senegal and possibly other West African nations boarded the ship. The journalists managed to identify 33 of them by name.
The contact list extracted from the SIM card of one of the crew members was the clue that allowed them to trace where the boat had come from. Calling contacts, they identified Soulayman Soumaré, a taxi driver from Sélibaby, in southern Mauritania. AP journalists traveled to Mauritania to speak with dozens of family and friends and reconstruct what happened. There they discovered that Soulayman had disappeared a year earlier, along with dozens of other young people from nearby towns. They had left the fishing town of Nouadhibou on a boat carrying 43 people bound for the Canary Islands on the night of January 12, 2021. But due to ocean currents, they ended up in Tobago.
The journalists traveled to the village of Bouroudji, where 11 of the missing came from, and shared with the families the information they had collected. The objects found, especially the clothes they were wearing, allowed many families to recognize their children. In the end, the Red Cross collected 51 DNA samples from relatives of 26 missing migrants in the hope of identifying the other bodies at the Trinidad Forensic Science Center, although no results are yet available.
In 2021, at least seven ships that appeared to be from northwest Africa appeared adrift off points in the Caribbean and Brazil. They all carried corpses.
As Renata Brito and Felipe Dana explain, these ghost ships are in part “an unwanted result of years of efforts and billions of dollars spent by Europe to stop crossings in the Mediterranean Sea.” In addition to the effects of the pandemic, this “pushes migrants to take the most dangerous route from northwest Africa through the Canaries.”
