UN and Haitian police discovered 17 human skulls on Saturday in a wooded area in an upscale suburb of the capital, officials and witnesses said.
Witnesses said at least some of the skulls were tossed from a moving car on Saturday morning along a main road in the Petionville suburb of Port-au-Prince.
Four UN civilian police officers measured and numbered the skulls, some of which were found in small gray plastic buckets, and stacked them into a cardboard box before removing them.
UN authorities were investigating, said UN spokesman David Wimhurst, who declined to give further details.
"All we know is that 17 skulls have been discovered," Wimhurst said. "The serious crimes unit of [the UN] is assisting the Haitian National Police, who are leading the inquiry."
"It could be a homicide," said Frantz Lerebours, a spokesman for Haiti's National Police. "The forensic scientists will have to analyze the skulls to find out what happened to those people because it's very curious that we found them all in the same place."
Local resident Emmanuel Crepsac, 44, said bystanders told him they saw an object tossed from a moving car. He said the unidentified object -- which rolled down an embankment into the trash-strewn wooded area -- contained some of the skulls.
"They said someone in the car just threw something down there and then sped off. When people went to see what it was, they saw some skulls," Crepsac said.
The wooded area is adjacent to several upscale restaurants frequented by wealthy Haitians and UN officials.
Some 7,300 UN troops and 1,750 international police are in the country under Brazilian command, helping maintain order.
A wave of kidnappings and violence has plagued Haiti, where criminal gangs have flourished in the aftermath of the rebellion that toppled former Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide in February 2004
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion