24316: Chamberlain (news) Gunmen storm Haiti jail holding ex-PM (later story) (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: Greg Chamberlain <GregChamberlain@compuserve.com>

     By Joseph Guyler Delva

     PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti, Feb 19 (Reuters) - Former Haitian Prime
Minister Yvon Neptune and another inmate linked to ousted ex-President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide were back in prison on Saturday after briefly
leaving amid conflicting accounts of an armed attack on the jail, witnesses
and officials said.
     Police said Neptune and former Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert
were returned to the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince where U.N
troops, trying to keep the peace in the unstable Caribbean country, said
they would now provide security.
     Police, U.N. peacekeepers and witnesses offered different accounts of
the incident involving Neptune, accused by the government of a massacre
during a revolt last year against Aristide.
     Police spokeswoman Jessie Coicou said Neptune and Privert escaped
along with other inmates when gunmen attacked the prison and sent poorly
armed prison guards fleeing. One off-duty prison guard was killed.
     A police source speaking on condition of anonymity said up to 500 of
the prison's 1,200 inmates may have escaped.
     "I don't have any evidence that they (Neptune and Privert) were being
held hostage by anybody," Coicou said.
     But several eyewitnesses said Neptune and Privert appeared to have
been taken out at gunpoint.
     "I saw three gunmen escorting Neptune and several other prisoners ...
," said Jacques Dameus, who said he was in front of the prison at the time.
"When they arrived at the gate of the National Penitentiary, Neptune did
not want to walk any further. One gunman raised his weapon and forced him
to walk."
     Three men later reported to police that gunmen escorting a man they
recognized as Neptune had forced them to hand over their car and had driven
him away in it.
     "I saw Neptune with my own eyes," said Ketel Jacob, who was in the
car. "He seemed to be taken by force."
     A spokesman for the peacekeeping mission, Damian Onses-Cardona, said
U.N. troops were called to a private house in Port-au-Prince in the evening
where they found Neptune and Privert unguarded and unharmed.
     They were returned to their cells and Onses-Cardona said U.N. police
would now maintain security inside the troubled penitentiary, which has
been wracked by riots, while U.N. troops would take up guard positions
outside.
     Bullet casings littered the ground outside the prison, clothes
discarded by fleeing inmates cluttered the pavement and bullet holes
pockmarked the walls of nearby houses.
     In addition to Neptune and Privert, who had been jailed for several
months without being indicted, witnesses said the gunmen took away a former
soldier named Anel Belzaire.
     Almost a year after Aristide fled the armed revolt -- his stature as
the father of Haitian democracy and champion of the country's poor sullied
by charges of despotism and corruption -- Haiti remains torn by political
violence.
     The government is pitted against street gangs still loyal to Aristide,
and its once warm relations with former soldiers who helped lead the revolt
against Aristide have chilled under their repeated demands for the
re-establishment of the army.