A vessel carrying up to 200 Haitian migrants capsized and sank near the Turks and Caicos Islands yesterday, the US coastguard said today.One survivor said the boat hit a reef near the islands, south-east of the Bahamas, as it attempted to elude police.
Around 70 passengers were stranded on a reef and four bodies were recovered, a coastguard spokeswoman in Miami said. The remainder of the passengers were missing, feared dead.
"Our main goal right now is just to get everybody out of the water and get medical attention for those who need it," Sabrina Elgammal said.
The accident happened at around 2pm yesterday. By late evening, Turks and Caicos rescue workers, using small boats, had reached about 40 of the people stranded on the reef, two miles south-east of West Caicos island.
The coastguard and island authorities were rescuing the others, a coastguard statement said.
The boat had been at sea for three days when passengers saw a police vessel and accidentally steered their craft on to a reef as they tried to escape, a survivor, Alces Julien, told the Associated Press.
Elgammal said information from survivors indicated that between 160 and 200 people had been on board when the vessel capsized. She added that the cause of the accident was under investigation.
Two coastguard helicopters were on the scene and a cutter was on the way to join the search for survivors.
Haitians often take to the seas in rickety, overcrowded boats in attempts to escape poverty in the western hemisphere's poorest nation.
In May 2007, an overcrowded sloop carrying more than 160 migrants capsized off the Turks and Caicos Islands.
Some of the victims were eaten by sharks, and some of the 78 survivors accused a Turks and Caicos patrol boat of ramming the vessel as it approached the shore and forcing it into deeper water.
In May, a boat carrying at about 30 mainly Haitian migrants capsized off the Florida coast, killing at least nine people including a pregnant woman.
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