Two people rescued and four death after sailboat fire near ni……..

 

Sad News sailboats on fire this morning

and four people’s have been found In the sailboat and two were alive

At least 40 migrants have died and several others were injured after a boat they were traveling in caught fire off the northern coast of Haiti, a United Nations agency said Friday. A government official said the migrants were trying to escape to the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The U.N.’s International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that the Haitian Coast Guard rescued 41 survivors, 11 of whom were hospitalized, including some for burns.

But “at least 40 migrants have died, and several others were injured,” the IOM said.

The dead included the captain of the boat, according to Arnold Jean, a spokesperson for the police in Cap-Haïtien.

The boat, carrying more than 80 people, had left the port of Labadee on Wednesday en route to the Turks and Caicos Islands, a 150-mile journey, the IOM reported, citing Haiti’s National Office for Migration.

 

The fire likely started when two drums of gasoline ignited, Civil Protection official Jean Henry-Petit said. Passengers were drinking rum and whiskey, according to a witness, which may have come into contact with the flammable substance, causing the fire.

 

“Desperate measures”

Migration from the poverty-stricken Caribbean country has been surging for months, as thousands of people flee a spike in violence from criminal gangs that now control wide swaths of territory.

 

“Haiti’s socioeconomic situation is in agony,” said Gregoire Goodstein, IOM’s chief of mission in the country. “The extreme violence over the past months has only brought Haitians to resort to desperate meas

ures even more.”