Washington - Ten members of a US missionary group accused of smuggling 33 children out of Haiti were charged Thursday with kidnapping minors and criminal association, CNN reported.
The 10 were taken back to jail in the Haitian capital, Port-au- Prince, after their hearing in court, the report said.
All of them are members of a Baptist church in Idaho, which started laying the basis for an orphanage for Haitian children in the Dominican Republic last year. When they tried to take 33 children out of Haiti several days ago without proper approval from either the Haitian or Dominican Republic governments, they were arrested.
The Americans insist that they were only trying to help the children leave the earthquake-hit country, but Haiti Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told CNN that the group was kidnapping the children.
'The children certainly were not fully willing to go, because in some cases, from what I heard, they were asking for their parents; they wanted to return to their parents,' he said.
The incident has triggered worldwide concern about the fate of Haiti's children, who are vulnerable to trafficking if they have been separated from parents or lost their parents in the earthquake. Even before the earthquake, there were an estimated 380,000 orphans in the country of 9 million, aid agencies have said.
No comments:
Post a Comment