Ten members of a US Christian group could be charged with kidnapping minors and child-trafficking over an attempt to smuggle a group of children out of quake-hit Haiti.
The ten could face trial in a US court where, if convicted, they could face severe penalties.
Mazar Fortil, interim prosecutor for the main Port-au-Prince court, said the group may also face a lesser charge of criminal conspiracy, but said it was ‘too early to tell’ whether they will be transferred to the US.
Haiti's Culture and Communications Minister Marie Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue said a Haitian judge would decide whether to transfer the case.
A first appearance for the group scheduled yesterday was postponed because an interpreter had not been made available.
The five men and five women with US passports, as well as two Haitians, were arrested on Friday as they tried to cross into the Dominican Republic in a bus with 33 children aged between two months and 14 years.
Laura Silsby, head of the Idaho-based group called New Life Children's Refuge, insisted the group's aims were entirely altruistic.
‘We came here literally to just help the children. Our intentions were good,’ she said from police detention. ‘We wanted to help those who lost parents in the quake or were abandoned.’
But as reports emerged that many of the children had parents, humanitarian groups worried that their fears of human trafficking amid Haiti's post-quake chaos had been confirmed.
‘For us it is important to clarify how those kids have been given to those people,’ Georg Willeit, a spokesman for SOS Children Village where the children are being cared for, said.
The aid group said parents are now coming to reclaim their children.
US State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said Washington would be guided by Haitian officials.
‘Once we know the facts we'll determine what the appropriate course is, but the judgement is really up to the Haitian government,’ he said.
Shortly after the 12 January quake, parents around the world waiting to adopt Haitian children pushed governments to speed up the process and Mr Crowley said that some 578 orphans had been brought to the US under relaxed adoption regulations.
On the ground in Haiti, aid distribution continues, but the UN's humanitarian chief acknowledged that the relief effort was still struggling nearly three weeks after the quake killed some 170,000 people.
‘It's not the co-ordination that's been an issue, it's just the sheer practical difficulty of getting things to happen on the scale you need quickly enough,’ John Holmes, the UN Emergency Relief Co-ordinator, said.
There were also new fears of violence in the Caribbean nation, which has been scarred by decades of political upheaval and bloodshed.
Gangs in the slums of Cite Soleil are ‘using intimidation, they're trying to use force, to undercut efforts to provide support,’ Army Colonel Gregory Kane told reporters, adding that the violence was delaying distribution in the area.
Outside the ravaged capital, mourners have gathered at a hilltop site where mass graves were dug to hold the bodies of thousands killed in the quake.
The dead were still being accounted for yesterday, with El Salvador confirming that Gerardo Le Chevalier, a Salvadoran citizen and head of the UN Electoral Assistance unit in Haiti, was killed in the 7.0 quake.
