Luis Alberto Polanco, the fisherman from the Dominican Republic who alerted the authorities to the discovery of a canoe with 14 corpses, "couldn't believe" what he was seeing and felt "pity", because perhaps the relatives of those people had been "looking for them for days or months, and couldn't find them".
In an interview with a regional radio station, collected by Efe, Luis Alberto Polanco points out that the sighting of the barge with the bodies of the deceased Africans was "something surprising and I felt sorry", because perhaps their relatives had been looking for them for a long time.
"And I thought that since I saw it and that's why I called the authorities, so they could pick them up," explains the fisherman, who last Tuesday got up, together with his son Jeremy, at 04:20 hours as every day they go out to work, and left their house at 05:00 to go to the lagoon and head to the sea.
Then he told his son that they should go towards a buoy "that we have outside and when we were on our way we saw that boat there, near where I have the buoy, and it was 07:00 in the morning when we arrived" and they realized at first sight that there were no people on the boat.
He recalls that at that moment the breeze picked up and there was "another companion of mine" in the area, so they approached the boat, "we stopped and asked ourselves because one didn't know what was there."
It was his companion who approached the barge and when Luis Alberto Polanco asked him what was there, he replied: "Do you know what's there? Many corpses!".
He was surprised: "What!", and started fishing because "I didn't believe it" until, after a while, he decided to approach "to see if it was true."
And upon arriving he realized that "there were many corpses there. I moved away because there was a bad smell, very strong, and we agreed to call the authority" and have them take steps to remove the bodies.
In that work they also found another difficulty, as a very strong breeze rose "and the wind quickly took the boat, which was high" from the position indicated by Luis Alberto Polanco, until he looked for the GPS to specify the place where it was located.
When the authorities finally arrived at the barge "I was already seeing it" and they managed to tie up the boat, recalls Luis Alberto Polanco, who confesses that due to the impact he did not count how many bodies were in the boat.
The canoe was located about 10 nautical miles off the coast of Río San Juan, in the north of the Dominican Republic, and the skeletal remains correspond to people from Africa, specifically from Senegal and Mauritania, according to documentation found next to the bodies, according to the Civil Defense, a body that works on the case together with personnel from various institutions.
In addition, a backpack was found on the boat containing 12 packages of a substance, presumably cocaine or heroin, which was seized and handed over to members of the National Directorate for Drug Control (DNCD) for the corresponding procedures, reported the Navy of the Dominican Republic.
