- The Coast Guard has suspended its search for 34 people who went missing after a boat capsized near Florida.
- Five bodies and one survivor have been recovered from the capsized vessel.
- USCG Commanding Officer Capt. Jo-Ann Burdian said it's not likely anyone else survived.
The US Coast Guard uncovered four more bodies from a boat that capsized off the coast of Florida, the agency said Thursday, raising the number of confirmed dead to five.
USCG Commanding Officer Capt. Jo-Ann Burdian announced she had made the "very difficult decision" to suspend the active search for the remaining 34 missing persons believed to have been onboard.
The maritime security agency searched a section of the Atlantic roughly the size of New Jersey and "saturated the area over and over again," Burdian said at a press conference on Thursday.
"It does mean that we don't think it's likely that anyone else has survived," she said.
On Tuesday, the Coast Guard found a survivor clinging to the hull of the capsized vessel about 45 miles east of Fort Pierce Inlet, Florida. The survivor said the 25-foot boat had capsized three days earlier.
The survivor said there had been 39 other people on board the boat, which had set sail from Bimini, the westernmost island in the Bahamas located about 55 miles from Florida's coast. None of the passengers were wearing life jackets, he also told authorities.
The boat is suspected to be part of a human smuggling operation, Burdian said on Wednesday. "This event occurred in a normal route for human smuggling from the Bahamas into the southeast US."
On Wednesday, search teams recovered one body from the area. Burdian called the situation "dire."
"The longer they remain in the water without food, without water, exposed to the marine environment, the sun, the sea conditions... Every moment that passes it becomes much more dire and unlikely that anyone could survive in those conditions," she told the press at a briefing that day.
In an unrelated case, the Coast Guard said on Wednesday it had intercepted 191 Haitians on board a sail freighter sailing from the island of Great Inagua, the Bahamas.
"The Coast Guard maintains a persistent presence patrolling the waters around Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Bahamas, to help prevent loss of life on the high seas," Lt. David Steele, Coast Guard liaison officer for US Embassy to Haiti, said in a press release. "These grossly overloaded vessels operate without proper safety equipment and are not built for these hazardous voyages."