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Authorities in the Florida Keys recovered three more lifeless bodies believed to belong to victims of the sinking of a boat in which some 25 Cubans were trying to reach the Florida Keys amid the storm surge caused by Hurricane Ian last week.
The bodies of three women were found this weekend in the mangroves near a naval air station in Key West, one of the Floridian keys closest to Cuba.
In the same area, known as Boca Chica, the bodies of a man and a woman believed to have also been part of the group whose boat wrecked on Sept. 28 as Ian approached southwest Florida as a major hurricane were discovered earlier, the Monroe County Sheriff’s Office said.
Nine people survived the shipwreck and are in the custody of the authorities.
When the U.S. Coast Guard confirmed the discovery of a man’s body in the mangrove swamp last Friday, 17 rafters from the shipwreck were still missing, according to a statement from the U.S. Coast Guard.
With the discovery of the four female corpses, thirteen are still missing.
“It is dangerous, but freedom is worth more than the danger we are in,” one of the rescued Cubans told local television station WPLG last Thursday.
According to the Cuban interviewed, whose name was not given, they had been at sea for five days at the time of the shipwreck.
“(We were stranded) two days and two nights off the coast of Cuba and they didn’t rescue us,” he said in reference to the island’s authorities.
More than 6,000 Cubans have been detained since October 2001 while trying to reach the United States by sea.
