21736: (Chamberlain) Criminals run amok in Haiti despite U.S. force (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Joseph Guyler Delva

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, May 6 (Reuters) - More than 3,000 escaped
convicts are running amok in Haiti threatening individuals and businesses,
unrestrained by a U.S.-led multinational force meant to keep the peace,
police and residents said on Thursday.
     Jails were emptied and prisoners set free across the Caribbean country
in February as an armed revolt swept out of the north toward
Port-au-Prince, eventually forcing President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from
power.
     But now many who supported the rebels, such as businessmen, are paying
the price and are being kidnapped, shot and robbed by bands of drug dealers
and other criminals.
     "Armed bandits visited me three times in two weeks and took away all
the money I had," said Josue Jeanty, 50, a grocery store owner in the
capital, where most of the 3,600 foreign troops led by U.S. Marines are on
patrol. The U.S.-led force will be replaced by an 8,000-strong U.N.
deployment in June.
     Jeanty said the last robbery occurred on Tuesday.
     "Should this situation continue, I'll have no choice but to close," he
told Reuters on Thursday, calling on the interim, U.S.-backed government
appointed after Aristide fled on Feb. 29, to recapture the criminals.
     Before the rebellion erupted on Feb. 5, Haiti's prison population was
3,302, including 2,000 in the Port-au-Prince national penitentiary. But now
not one remains behind bars.
     Haiti's motley police force, dispirited even before the rebels and
former soldiers drove them out of several northern towns, has been whittled
down to fewer than 2,500 officers for a country of 8 million.
     Several prominent businessmen and members of the wealthy elite have
been kidnapped and held for ransom in recent weeks. Last month, the wife of
the Bahamian ambassador, Eugene Newry, and her Royal Bahamas Police Force
escort, were shot during a robbery attempt in a Port-au-Prince marketplace.
     Heavily armed gangs regularly seize truckloads of goods in commercial
districts in Port-au-Prince, and more than a dozen people have been killed
in the past two weeks, witnesses said.
     The situation has become so dire that the United Nations warned from
Geneva this week that roadside hijackings and other crimes were threatening
the distribution of humanitarian aid in the poorest country of the
Americas.
     Judicial police director, Inspector General Michael Lucius, said one
escaped killer, Herold Bazile, whose street name is "One Bullet in the
Head," had formed a gang that included criminal deportees from the United
States.
     "They are heavily armed, they hit every day. We have been trying to
get them, but we haven't succeeded yet," Lucius told Reuters. He said the
slum where the gang was based could not be entered by police without
suffering high casualties.