Thousands of Haitians prepared to sleep in schools and a theater around the main square of Port-au-Prince on Friday, after fresh attacks by armed gangs pushed already displaced people downtown to seek shelter wherever they could.
The Gran Ravine gang, led by Renel Destina, has besieged the densely populated neighborhood of Carrefour Feuilles for weeks, forcing aid workers to withdraw and thousands of people to flee their homes. Under-resourced police have struggled to contain the violence.
Dailove Pompilus, who was nine months pregnant, said she had no choice but to come to the Champ de Mars square after the gang attacked her home in Carrefour Feuilles, killing her three-year-old son.
Photo: Reuters
“My first child,” she said. “They burned down the house with him inside.”
Sophia Jean, another resident, fled with her eight-month-old baby and the clothes on her back. “I did not have time to take anything,” she said.
By nightfall, people took refuge at nearby schools and the Rex Theater.
Yves Penel, a theater manager speaking at the main square, said hundreds of people had arrived on Thursday overnight, and that they had created committees to manage food, water and hygiene.
“I grew up in Carrefour Feuilles,” Penel said. “We will do what we have to do.”
The UN estimates more than 10,000 people have been displaced in the last two weeks alone.
Thursday night marked the first time since the catastrophic 2010 earthquake that people have camped in the Champ de Mars, the capital’s main square that is home to historical monuments honoring heroes of the Haitian Revolution.
“They shot at us,” said Clerina Coffy, who fled Place Jeremie, a makeshift camp roughly 1.5km away, with her three children during Thursday night. “We are here because we have nowhere to go with the kids.”
Local reporters said some people looking to leave the city had gathered at a bus station while elsewhere civil defense groups reinforced barricades.
Although schools are set to resume this month, many are hosting displaced people, and the education ministry has called for the buildings to be protected.
Haiti’s gang warfare has left about 2,500 dead and 1,000 injured since January, according to the UN, amid widespread kidnappings, lynchings and sexual violence.
The UN Security Council is expected to vote on a plan to send international security assistance, which Haiti’s unelected government requested last October. A Kenyan delegation met with police chiefs last month, but a multinational force has yet to materialize.
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
RSS