A search was launched on Tuesday to find 39 people missing after their boat capsized on Saturday, suspected of carrying migrants off the coast of Florida, the US Coast Guard said. The boat, which left the Bimini Islands in the Bahamas, capsized on Saturday about 70 km east of the Fort Pierce Inlet park, due to bad weather, the coast guard said on Twitter, which suspects an operation “of trafficking in human beings”.
The Miami Coast Guard was alerted after a good Samaritan rescued a man who was clinging to an overturned boat about 45 miles east of Fort Pierce on Tuesday morning. The survivor told the US Coast Guard that he and 39 other people left the Bahamas on Saturday evening. Bad weather caused the boat to capsize, and none of the passengers were wearing life jackets.
“Coastguard air and surface crews are actively searching for people in the water,” the official law enforcement account tweeted on Tuesday. Several ships and planes participated in the search between the Bimini, a small archipelago located east of Miami, and Fort Pierce, further north.
The Bahamas, an archipelago of 700 islets (including 39 inhabited) located 80 km southeast of the coast of Florida, close to Jamaica, Cuba and Haiti are regularly used as a land of transit by migrants who seek to reach the United States, and as a starting point for a dangerous crossing by Haitians living in the archipelago.
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