24357: Hermantin (News)Ex-priest questioned in jail break (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: leonie hermantin <lhermantin@hotmail.com>

Posted on Thu, Feb. 24, 2005


HAITI
Ex-priest questioned in jail break
A former priest was questioned and released by police after a Haitian
official said a jail break was planned at his guesthouse.
By JANE REGAN
Special to The Herald

PORT-AU-PRINCE - A U.S. citizen and former priest was held and questioned
for more than eight hours by Haitian police Wednesday in connection with
Saturday's jail break in which heavily armed gunmen freed almost 500
prisoners.

Ron Voss was released Wednesday evening.

''Police let him go home for the night but they kept his passport, and he
has to go back [Thursday] morning for questioning,'' said Bill Quigley, an
American lawyer who was with Voss at the time of his arrest.

Voss, the director of Visitation House, a guesthouse in Port-au-Prince, the
capital, was led away by a judge and a dozen police officers Wednesday
afternoon. The arrest came less than 24 hours after Haitian Minister of
Justice Bernard Gousse said the prison break was planned at Voss'
guesthouse.

''There was a meeting that happened at an NGO [nongovernmental organization]
called Parish Twinning. That is where people planned this operation,''
Gousse said at a news conference on Tuesday.

Visitation House is the Haitian office for the Tennessee-based Haiti Parish
Twinning Program, which pairs U.S. and Haitian churches. The guesthouse also
is often the base for delegations of volunteers from U.S. churches and other
NGOs that work in Haiti's slums or interior.

The heavily armed police cut through a chain at the gate and then searched
Voss' office and bedroom before taking him to the Haitian Judicial Police
headquarters for questioning. Quigley, a law professor from Loyola
University in New Orleans who is visiting Haiti, accompanied Voss.

''This is absolutely bizarre,'' Detroit Bishop Thomas Gumbleton told The
Herald.

Gumbleton arrived in Haiti Monday with a delegation that is doing volunteer
medical work in Cité Soleil, one of Haiti's poorer areas.

''For them to make this charge is so bizarre, you wonder how they could
dream up such a thing,'' he said.

Voss is a former Catholic priest whose last diocese was in Lafayette, Ind.
He has lived in Haiti for almost 20 years, and has run the guesthouse since
it was founded more than a decade ago.