At least 40 Haitian migrants died when their boat caught fire off Cap-Haitien on Haiti’s northern coast, the UN’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) said on Friday. Forty-one people were rescued by the Haitian Coast Guard.
The vessel had left the port of Labadee on Wednesday with more than 80 people aboard, bound for the Turks and Caicos Islands, more than 220 km (137 miles) away. The captain died in the fire. Eleven survivors went to hospital, some with burns, and the IOM said it was assisting the injured.
Civil Protection official Jean Henry-Petit said the blaze apparently began when two drums of gasoline ignited. The exact cause was not yet clear. A local official told Reuters that people on board had been lighting candles in a ritual to ask for safe passage, which set the fuel drums alight.
“IOM deeply laments the death of at least 40 migrants,” the agency said in a press release. Haitian police said they were searching for the people who organised the trip.
Why they leave
Grégoire Goodstein, the IOM’s chief of mission in Haiti, tied the deaths to conditions at home. “Haiti’s socio-economic situation is in agony,” he said. “The extreme violence over the past months has only brought Haitians to resort to desperate measures even more.” He added that the fire showed the risks for children, women and men on irregular routes, and the need for safe and legal pathways.
Gangs control up to 80 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, according to the figures reported with the news. The UN estimates that about 580,000 people have fled their homes since March. UN data showed gang violence killing or injuring more than one person an hour on average in the first three months of the year. Hundreds of Kenyan police arrived in Haiti this month to help Haitian forces against the gangs.
The IOM said regular migration is out of reach for most Haitians, leaving many to see irregular travel as their only option, “a particularly life-threatening one in most instances.”
The United States, the Bahamas, the Turks and Caicos Islands and Jamaica have all reported more boats arriving from Haiti. Neighbouring countries have forcibly returned more than 86,000 migrants to Haiti this year, the IOM said.
Sources
- TRT World – Fire on migrant boat kills dozens off Haiti — IOM
- Haiti: Boat fire kills at least 40 migrants, UN agency says
- TRT World – Fire on migrant boat kills dozens off Haiti — IOM
