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HAITI: Officials to help ‘kidnapped’ children find relatives
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CHILDREN: Jean-Max Bellerive
GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS are to interview 33 children to find any living relatives after they were taken from 10 Americans who tried to remove them from Haiti.
The children were re-housed after officials arrested 10 American charity workers on child trafficking charges in Haiti. They were caught trying to bus the children into neighbouring Dominican Republic, following the January 12 earthquake that left hundreds of thousands dead.
Haitian prime minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN: “The children certainly were not fully willing to go, because in some cases, from what I heard, they were asking for their parents."
But the five men and five women, members of the Idaho-based charity New Life Children's Refuge, have denied claims they were trying to kidnap the 33 Haitian children. The group said they were trying to rescue the children, who they thought were orphans.
"We came into Haiti to help those that really had no other source of help," one of the women, Laura Silsby, told CNN.
Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue, Haiti's Culture and
Communications Minister, told Times Online the Americans could be sent home for trial because Haiti's judicial system is barely functioning since the earthquake.
Published: 08 February 2010
Issue: 1409
