Coast Guard suspends search for abandoned ship after US attacks on suspected drug ships

CNN
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The U.S. Coast Guard announced late Friday that it was suspending its search for people in the water following U.S. attacks on suspected drug-smuggling vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean earlier this week.

The U.S. military said Tuesday it attacked a “convoy” of three drug trafficking vessels in international waters, killing three people aboard one of the vessels, while the occupants of the other two abandoned their ship.

The U.S. Southern Command previously said it notified the Coast Guard after Tuesday’s attack to activate search and rescue efforts, but did not say where the attack took place.

The Coast Guard said in a news release Friday that it coordinated more than 65 hours of search efforts about 400 nautical miles southwest of the Mexico-Guatemala border, but that “available resources were extremely limited due to distance and range restrictions.”

“Suspending a search is never easy, and given the exhaustive search effort, lack of positive indications and diminishing chances of survival, we have suspended active search efforts pending further developments,” Coast Guard Capt. Patrick Dill said in the release. “At this point in the intervention, the likelihood of a positive outcome, based on the time elapsed, environmental conditions and resources available to a person in the water, is very low.”