The Trinidad and To­ba­go Coast Guard has lost a mys­tery pirogue con­tain­ing the de­com­pos­ing bod­ies of five uniden­ti­fied in­di­vid­u­als dur­ing a re­cov­ery op­er­a­tion ear­ly Sun­day morn­ing.

The ves­sel, dis­cov­ered near the Cas­sia plat­form on Sat­ur­day re­mains un­trace­able af­ter it slipped from a tow­line and is now pre­sumed to have sunk.

The Coast Guard said it first re­ceived the re­port of the ves­sel at 2:22 pm on Sat­ur­day. A pa­trol boat was dis­patched and, with help from near­by ves­sels, lo­cat­ed the de­te­ri­o­rat­ed pirogue.

Lieu­tenant Khadi­ja Lamy, Pub­lic Re­la­tions Of­fi­cer for the Coast Guard, ex­plained, “Ef­forts to se­cure the ves­sel were ex­treme­ly chal­leng­ing due to its frag­ile con­di­tion.”

At 12:45 am on Sun­day, the crew suc­cess­ful­ly at­tached a tow­line and be­gan trans­port­ing the ves­sel to­ward main­land Trinidad. How­ev­er, at around 4 am, the tow­line sep­a­rat­ed in rough seas east of Ma­yaro, and the ves­sel drift­ed out of sight. “De­spite ex­ten­sive search ef­forts, we could not re­lo­cate the pirogue, which is pre­sumed to have sunk due to its se­vere­ly de­te­ri­o­rat­ed state,” Lamy said.

The ves­sel has drawn com­par­isons to a sim­i­lar in­ci­dent in May 2021, where a boat con­tain­ing African mi­grants was found off the coast of To­ba­go.

Ac­cord­ing to Lamy, “The con­struc­tion of this ves­sel is strik­ing­ly sim­i­lar to that one, and it is rea­son­able to as­sume this case may be of a sim­i­lar na­ture.”

“We re­main com­mit­ted to un­der­stand­ing the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing this trag­ic dis­cov­ery,” Lamy said.

The Coast Guard is urg­ing any­one with in­for­ma­tion or sight­ings of the ves­sel or de­bris to con­tact their head­quar­ters at 868-224-3324.