Can you imagine surviving more than a year out at sea and then coming home to this? What would you do?
A castaway who survived 15 months at sea is being sued for $1million by the family of his dead friend who claim he stayed alive by eating him, it was reported on Tuesday.
Salvador Alvarenga, 36, washed ashore in January last year in the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, after spending 438 days adrift.
He had drifted 6,700 miles from the coast of Mexico, where the boat he and crewmate Ezequiel Cordoba, 22, were sailing in was crippled by a storm.
Mr Alvarenga, from El Salvador, later told how stayed alive by drinking urine and turtle blood and eating fish and birds he caught by hand.
And the tuna fisherman described how, after his best friend starved to death early on, he left the rotting body at the boat’s bow for six days for company.
But the family of Mr Cordoba are now demanding a million dollars (£650,000) compensation after claiming that he was a victim of cannibalism, according to reports.
Mr Alvarenga’s lawyer, Ricardo Cucalon, told El Salvador’s El Diario de Hoy newspaper denied that the castaway had eaten his shipmate but had instead thrown his body into the water.
Read more: Daily Mail
