Three days after the passenger-cargo vessel MV Barima sank off Guyana’s coast on a Saturday night, recovery efforts have yielded 53 bodies as of Tuesday evening, Prime Minister Mark Phillips has confirmed in an official update. Of the 53 remains recovered, 26 have been formally and positively identified to help notify next of kin.
Tuesday alone marked a grim milestone for the operation, with 22 bodies pulled from the waters surrounding the sinking site, Phillips told reporters. A joint team of French military personnel and local Guyanese divers already completed a preliminary survey of the sunken wreckage resting on the seafloor on Tuesday, locating one additional body that crews were unable to retrieve during the initial dive. According to Phillips, recovery teams are bracing for more discoveries as they continue accessing the wreck. “There’s a likelihood that they may encounter more bodies there,” he said in a statement to media.
To step up the intensive search and retrieval operations at the wreck site, additional international assets are scheduled to arrive on Wednesday. Detachments from the Trinidad and Tobago Coast Guard and the Brazilian Navy will join the ongoing effort, bringing extra diving capacity and technical resources to speed up recovery work.
Maritime Administration Director-General Stephen Thomas has released initial details addressing early speculation about the vessel’s operating status before the sinking. The MV Barima is officially rated to carry 126 tonnes of cargo alongside up to 394 passengers, though Thomas noted that the actual number of people and volume of goods on board can shift from voyage to voyage, depending on the specific trip’s configuration. Early assessments based on the vessel’s load line markings, a key industry indicator of safe loading, confirm the ship was not overloaded at the time of its sinking, Thomas added.
The update, published on 21 July 2026 by Denis Chabrol, comes as Guyana’s authorities work to coordinate a multi-national response to one of the country’s deadliest recent maritime incidents.