Florida police are dredging dozens of sunken cars from a Doral lake that they say could possibly be linked to cold case crimes

• Divers say they found 32 cars in a Florida lake while following leads in decades-old cold cases.
• On Tuesday, the Miami-Dade police department started hauling up cars from the bottom of the lake.

Florida police are working to pull dozens of old cars recently found submerged in a muddy lake — and authorities say the vehicles could potentially be linked to cold cases.

At least one of the sunken cars recovered from the lake in the city of Doral has already been confirmed stolen by police.

Members of the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Doral Police Department began hauling the rusted cars out of the lake on Tuesday morning after volunteer divers on a mission to solve missing persons cases found more than 30 of them at the bottom of the lake.

As of Wednesday afternoon, four vehicles have been recovered, including an Acura Legend, a Ford Econoline 3500, and a Cadillac Sedan DeVille, according to the Miami-Dade Police Department.

Det. Luis Sierra, a spokesman for the Miami-Dade Police Department, told Insider that investigators learned one of the cars had been stolen and that he expects more to have the same outcome.

Sierra added that the vehicles "are really old cars" and have "probably been in that lake for a long time."

"There was no car that was there from the 2000s," he said.

Sierra explained that investigators will continue to check the VIN numbers on the cars as they pull them up to see if any of the vehicles were involved in past crimes.

It's "absolutely" possible the cars could be linked to a myriad of cold case crimes, Sierra said.

"We're not gonna discard the possibility of some type of fraud that also can occur and some other type of foul play like a homicide," Miami-Dade Police Department spokesman Det. Alvaro Zabaleta told USA Today.

A team of divers working for a private company discovered the cars, reported Miami television station WSVN 7News. Ken Fleming, one of the divers, told 7News that his team has been following the trail on multiple cold cases, some involving people who have been missing for three to four decades.

One case involved a person who disappeared when driving to the airport from Pinellas County. This lead brought the divers to a lake near Northwest 87th Avenue and 13th Terrace, 7News reported.

Videos obtained by 7News showed the divers swimming through murky water and finding multiple cars rotting at the bottom of the lake.

"When we discover a spot like this with multiple vehicles, it pretty much indicates that a crime where they're disposing the vehicles and hiding them from law enforcement," Fleming told 7News.

"In this spot, we're near the airport, it's a large body of water, it has easy access to get into, so we would target that as a potential foul play spot," Fleming added.