Many feared eaten by sharks on refugee voyage

Press, 8 October 1987, Page 6

Many feared eaten by sharks on refugee voyage

NZPA-Reuter Santo Domingo As many as 100 people fleeing the Dominican Republic for Puerto Rico were feared torn to pieces by sharks on Tuesday after their fragile boat broke up 15km from shore. “It was horrific, worse than death,” an unnamed survivor sobbed in a local radio broadcast, describing how he saw sharks snapping at people as he bobbed from wave to wave.

Fishermen who rushed to the rescue said there were thought to have been between 100 and 130 people aboard the clandestine refugee boat, and officials said that by late on Tuesday only 23 survivors had been found. Survivors, fishermen and rescue workers said they saw a school of sharks tearing at bodies in the blood-soaked Monal

channel, a patch of ocean between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

“We saw sharks chewing up people in the water,” the Dominican Civil Defence forces director Eugenio Cabral told reporters after flying over the scene. “It was a horrible experience.” “Never in my life have I seen anything like it," said Luis Rolon Nevarez, a Puerto Rican Civil Defence official who flew with him. Hundreds of Dominican Republic residents, and even more from neighbouring Haiti, have drowned or disappeared over the last few years on desperate job-seeking trips to more prosperous Puerto Rico.

Officials said they could only guess at the death toll. Such trips are totally secret, with the organisers, sailors and refugees

liable to heavy punishment if caught As a result the refugees’ names are never known, the boats do not carry names and are shoddily-built they said. One Dominican Republic official who flew over the scene said earlier that there “must have been at least 50, judging by the mess we could see.” Dominican Republic fishermen were the first on the scene after dawn on Tuesday. They had been warned by a blast indicating the boat’s engine may have exploded and the vessel broken up, they said later. Military helicopters hauled at least three survivors to safety but by then most of the refugees had been eaten alive by sharks, they added. Three of the survivors were women, officials said. Tuesday’s ill-fated wooden craft was thought

to have left early on Tuesday morning for the. 12-14’ hour trip east to Puerto Rico, fishermen said. It was believed to have sailed from the northeastern village of Baoba del Pinal and would normally have held back until well after dark o& Tuesday night before trying to evade Puerto Rican Coast Guard vessels. Most of the refugees, unable to earn a living in their own country, head for Puerto Rico seeking jobs as farmhands. Some try to continue illegally to the United States. The voyages are big business for the organisers, who charge from SUSSOO to lUSIOOO (1765 to $1530) per person. The sum is enormous to a Dominican Republic peasant, who sees it as a .ticket to a desperate dream.