A US Coast Guard cutter, two airplanes and a helicopter were searching the waters off the Dominican Republic for survivors after a boat carrying Haitian migrants caught fire, killing at least eight passengers and leaving 44 missing.
The boat was traveling from the northern Haitian town of Cap-Haitien to the Turks and Caicos when it caught fire about 37km north of the Dominican Republic, Coast Guard spokesman Barry Bena said on Thursday.
Two migrants were pulled from the water on Wednesday and brought to a hospital in Montecristi on the Dominican Republic's north coast.
It appeared the migrants had been in the water for at least a day when they were spotted by a US yacht cruising from Panama, said Captain Jose Antonio Carrero, commander of the Dominican Navy's northern operations.
"They found just the two people, not the boat, not anything," Carrero said.
The rescued pair -- a 27-year-old man named Kenson Loucien and a 23-year-old woman whose name was unknown -- were being treated on Thursday for first-degree burns and dehydration, Maria Belliard said.
Eight passengers were found dead in the Atlantic Ocean.
Authorities did not know when the blaze occurred, when the ship set sail or what caused the fire.
Thousands of Haitians take to the sea on flimsy boats each year, heading toward Florida to escape grinding poverty and political turmoil in the Western Hemisphere's poorest country. Nearly all are intercepted and repatriated to their homeland, where the vast majority of the nation's 8 million people lives on less than US$1 a day.
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