A one-year-old baby died in his mother's arms on Saturday during an operation to intercept a boat carrying illegal immigrants by the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard who admitted shooting at the boat, in a press release released on Sunday.
According to this text, the TTS Scarborough, a coastguard boat, tried to intercept a boat that had illegally entered territorial waters from Venezuela "
Saturday shortly before midnight
".
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Despite warning shots in the air and warnings over the loudspeaker,
"the boat continued to want to get away"
and then "
continued its aggressive maneuvers (...) attempting to ram"
the Scarborough, according to the text.
"
The officers feared for their lives and, in self-defense, they fired at the engines to try to stop the boat"
, from the same source.
Coastguards say they discovered the presence of illegal migrants once on board.
“An illegal immigrant woman who was holding a baby reported that she was bleeding ... She was transferred to a medical center.
Unfortunately, the baby was no longer responding”
, from the same source.
“
The Coast Guard sends its sincere condolences to the family”
, concludes the text which underlines that the Coast Guard “
will continue
” their operations “
to ensure the security of Trinidad and Tobago”
.
Read alsoNearly two million Venezuelan migrants regularized in Colombia
The migrant boat had left Saturday evening from the Venezuelan state of Delta Amacuro (east), where it is estimated that between six and ten boats leave daily with migrants, the human rights activist told AFP. man Orlando Moreno.
“
We saw it coming because they (coastguards) are firing on the boat's engines to stop them.
In this case, the protocol escaped them
,” continued Moreno, who has been in contact with relatives of the deceased baby.
Clandestine shuttles
Since 2018, more than a hundred people have lost their lives in shipwrecks in this area.
In December 2020, around 30 people died in the sinking of a boat that had left Güiria illegally.
Many boats make clandestine shuttles between the two countries, a hundred kilometers apart, transporting in particular illegal migrants wanting to reach Trinidad and Tobago to flee the crisis in Venezuela, in the midst of an economic slump.
It is not uncommon for boats to be overloaded and accidents abound.
The Scarborough is one of the two ships delivered in November to Trinidad by Australia and which should make it possible to fight against fishing, smuggling and illegal immigration.
In recent months, Trinidad and Tobago has tightened its policy of deporting Venezuelan migrants, ensuring that its people are "
attacked
" by illegal migrants.
According to the UN, some 5 million Venezuelans have fled the country of 30 million people since 2015, with 25,000 choosing as their destination Trinidad and Tobago, a country of 1.3 million people, which says it has registered the arrival of 16,000 Venezuelans.
