SAINT-MARC, Haiti (AP) — Nearly 6,300 people have fled their homes after a gang attack in central Haiti that left at least 70 dead, the U.N. migration agency reported.
Nearly 90% of displaced people are staying with relatives or host families, while 12% have found shelter in other places including a school, the International Organization for Migration said.
The attack in Pont-Sondé occurred early Thursday morning and many people fled at night.
The gang members “came shooting and invading homes to rob and burn. I barely had time to take my children and run in the dark,” said Sonise Mirano, 60, who was camping with hundreds of people in a park in the coastal city of Saint-Marc on Sunday.
Bodies lay in the streets of Pont-Sondé after the attack in the Artibonite region, many of them with a bullet in the head, Bertide Harace, spokesperson for the Commission for Dialogue, Reconciliation and Peace, told Magik 9 radio on Friday. Consciousness to Save Artibonite.
Initial estimates put the death toll at 20, but activists and government officials have discovered more bodies as they have entered other parts of the city. Among the victims was a young mother, her newborn baby and a birth attendant, Herace said.
Prime Minister Garry Conille, in remarks Friday in Saint-Marc, promised that those responsible will be brought to justice.
“It is necessary to arrest them, bring them to justice and place them in prison. “They must pay for what they did, and the victims must be compensated,” he asserted.
The U.N. Human Rights Office said in a statement that it is “horrified by Thursday’s gang attacks.”
The European Union also condemned the violence in a statement on Friday. The incident, he indicated, marks “yet another escalation in the extreme violence that these criminal groups are inflicting on the Haitian people.”
The Haitian government dispatched an elite police unit to Pont-Sondé after the attack and sent medical teams to help the area’s only hospital.
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Hughes reported from Rio de Janeiro.
