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
DEATH CONSTANTLY LOOMING: Decades of detention took a major toll on Iwao Hakamada’s mental health, his lawyers describing him as ‘living in a world of fantasy’ A Japanese man wrongly convicted of murder who was the world’s longest-serving death row inmate has been awarded US$1.44 million in compensation, an official said yesterday. The payout represents ￥12,500 (US$83) for each day of the more than four decades that Iwao Hakamada spent in detention, most of it on death row when each day could have been his last. It is a record for compensation of this kind, Japanese media said. The former boxer, now 89, was exonerated last year of a 1966 quadruple murder after a tireless campaign by his sister and others. The case sparked scrutiny of the justice system in
The head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, was sacked yesterday, days after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he no longer trusts him, and fallout from a report on the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack. “The Government unanimously approved Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposal to end ISA Director Ronen Bar’s term of office,” a statement said. He is to leave his post when his successor is appointed by April 10 at the latest, the statement said. Netanyahu on Sunday cited an “ongoing lack of trust” as the reason for moving to dismiss Bar, who joined the agency in 1993. Bar, meant to
Indonesia’s parliament yesterday amended a law to allow members of the military to hold more government roles, despite criticisms that it would expand the armed forces’ role in civilian affairs. The revision to the armed forces law, pushed mainly by Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto’s coalition, was aimed at expanding the military’s role beyond defense in a country long influenced by its armed forces. The amendment has sparked fears of a return to the era of former Indonesian president Suharto, who ex-general Prabowo once served and who used military figures to crack down on dissent. “Now it’s the time for us to ask the
‘HUMAN NEGLIGENCE’: The fire is believed to have been caused by someone who was visiting an ancestral grave and accidentally started the blaze, the acting president said Deadly wildfires in South Korea worsened overnight, officials said yesterday, as dry, windy weather hampered efforts to contain one of the nation’s worst-ever fire outbreaks. More than a dozen different blazes broke out over the weekend, with Acting South Korean Interior and Safety Minister Ko Ki-dong reporting thousands of hectares burned and four people killed. “The wildfires have so far affected about 14,694 hectares, with damage continuing to grow,” Ko said. The extent of damage would make the fires collectively the third-largest in South Korea’s history. The largest was an April 2000 blaze that scorched 23,913 hectares across the east coast. More than 3,000
RSS