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At least 40 Haitian migrants killed in boat fire

A boy briefly stops up the steep mountain in the northern Haiti town of Milot, where the Citadelle Henry fortress can be seen in the background. (Jose Iglesias)
By Amanda Coletta Washington Post
A boy briefly stops up the steep mountain in the northern Haiti town of Milot, where the Citadelle Henry fortress can be seen in the background. (Jose Iglesias)

At least 40 Haitian migrants were killed and scores were injured after the boat they were traveling on caught fire off the northern coast of Haiti, the International Organization for Migration said Friday.

The boat, which was carrying at least 80 people and headed to Turks and Caicos, left the northern city of Cap-Haïtien around 4 a.m. on Wednesay. It caught fire a short time later near Labadee.

The Haitian coast guard rescued more than 40 survivors, the IOM said.

“This devastating event highlights the risks faced by children, women and men migrating through irregular routes, demonstrating the crucial need for safe and legal pathways to migration,” Grégoire Goodstein, the IOM’s chief in Haiti, said in a statement.

The fire came the same week that a second contingent of Kenyan police officers arrived in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince as part of a U.N.-backed international security mission to beat back the heavily armed gangs that control at least 80% of the city and to allow new elections.

Gangs killed at least 3,250 people in Haiti from January to May, the U.N. office in Haiti reported last month, up more than 30% from the previous five months.

The violence has forced more than 570,000 people to flee their homes.

The security challenges have exacerbated a humanitarian crisis in a country long saddled with endemic poverty and where roughly half of the people suffer from acute hunger.

“Haiti’s socio-economic situation is in agony,” Goodstein said. “The extreme violence over the past months has only brought Haitians to resort to desperate measures even more.”

More than 86,000 migrants have been forcibly returned to Haiti this year by neighboring countries, the IOM said.

In the weeks since several hundred Kenyan police officers arrived in Haiti, they have joined the Haitian National Police on street patrols, but they have yet not started operations to pacify gang-controlled neighborhoods.

Dennis B. Hankins, the U.S. ambassador to Haiti, said he expects those operations to begin “within the next few weeks.”

As the violence has worsened, Haitians have often taken to the sea to seek refuge elsewhere, many of them making risky trips on rickety boats or other makeshift vessels that are not fit for such voyages. The Turks and Caicos Islands, a British overseas territory, is a common destination. Others head for the Bahamas or the Florida coast.

The United States Coast Guard and Royal Bahamas Defense Force on Thursday announced that they were suspending the search for 60 Haitian migrants that may have left the Bahamas for Florida on July 4 on a boat that was experiencing engine issues.

The IOM says that collecting figures on the number who die at sea is challenging because of “the remote nature of maritime routes, the secrecy in which boats set out and the lack of information on trajectories.”

“Many, many boats leave (Haiti),” said Antoine Lemonnier, an IOM spokesman in the country. “Many are intercepted by foreign coast guards … and probably many are dying and we will never know about it.”