Ten members of a US Christian group could be charged with kidnapping minors and child-trafficking over an attempt to smuggle a group of children out of quake-hit Haiti, officials said.
Amid growing concern over the safety of hundreds of thousands of women and children left vulnerable after the Jan. 12 quake, the 10 could be put on trial in a US court.
Mazar Fortil, interim prosecutor for the main Port-au-Prince court, said the group may also face a charge of criminal conspiracy in Haiti, but said it was “too early to tell” whether they will be transferred to the US.
Haiti’s Culture and Communications Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said a Haitian judge would decide whether to transfer the case, but a first appearance for the group scheduled on Monday was postponed because a Creole language interpreter had not been made available.
The five men and five women with US passports, as well as two Haitians, were seized late on Friday as they tried to cross into the Dominican Republic in a bus with 33 children aged between two months and 14 years.
Laura Silsby, head of the Idaho-based group called New Life Children’s Refuge, insisted the group’s aims were entirely altruistic.
“We came here literally to just help the children. Our intentions were good,” she said from police detention. “We wanted to help those who lost parents in the quake or were abandoned.”
However, as reports emerged that many of the children had parents, humanitarian groups worried that their fears of human trafficking amid Haiti’s post-quake chaos had been confirmed.
“For us it is important to clarify how those kids have been given to those people,” said Georg Willeit, a spokesman for SOS Children Village where the youngsters are being cared for. “One of the girls, 10 years old, said that her mother went to the bus to say goodbye, so we have to clarify the whole situation.”
State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Washington would be guided by Haitian officials.
“Once we know the facts we’ll determine what the appropriate course is, but the judgment is really up to the Haitian government,” he said.
Shortly after the quake, parents around the world waiting to adopt Haitian children pushed governments to speed up the process and Crowley said on Monday that some 578 orphans had been brought to the US under relaxed adoption regulations.
On the ground in Haiti, aid distribution continued, but the UN’s humanitarian chief acknowledged that the relief effort was still struggling nearly three weeks after the quake killed some 170,000 people.
Outside the ravaged capital, mourners gathered at a hilltop site where mass graves were dug to hold the bodies of thousands killed in the quake.
“Until now, I did not have the chance to honor the memory of my classmates who died,” Desermithe Pierre, 16, said at the site in Titanyen.
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