Police in Haiti have vowed to ramp up the fight against escalating gang violence after fresh attacks in the capital this week, which forced dozens of families to flee their homes.
Authorities evacuated students at a school in western Port-au-Prince following heavy gunfire in the area near the renowned Oloffson Hotel.
Meanwhile, posts circulated on social media about a group of priests trapped inside a church in the capital’s Carrefour-Feuilles neighbourhood, which was attacked by the Viv Ansanm gang coalition late on Tuesday.
“They’re trying to take more areas, but police are there, making sure that doesn’t happen,” Lionel Lazarre, deputy spokesman for Haiti’s national police, told a press conference on Wednesday.
Police have new plans to fight the gangs that already control 85% of Haiti’s capital, according to Lazarre, who declined to provide further details due to safety reasons.
Lazarre said police recently seized 10,000 bullets, weapons and drugs from a minibus in the town of Mirebalais, northeast of the Port-au-Prince. Two of the four people carrying the ammunition were lynched by a mob on Sunday, while the others escaped, he added.
The latest attacks come just days after William O’Neill, the UN’s human rights expert on Haiti, visited the Caribbean country and said gang violence was more dire than ever.
“These violent criminal groups continue to extend and consolidate their hold even beyond the capital,” he said. “They kill, rape, terrorise, set fire to homes, orphanages, schools, hospitals, places of worship.”
O’Neill said more than 1 million people have been displaced, with nowhere to go. In makeshift camps, he said, hunger and sexual violence are widespread and “for many, it’s a matter of survival”.
He urged Haitian authorities to beef up the police force — which numbers 9,000 to 10,000 in a country of 11 million people — compared with about 50,000 in the neighbouring Dominican Republic, which has a similar population.
O’Neill also called for a reinforcement of the Kenya-led multinational force, which started arriving in June and numbers about 1,000 police. He said a well-equipped force of 2,500 “could have an enormous impact on controlling, dismantling, overpowering the gangs”.
On Tuesday, the US extended its ban on flights to Haiti’s capital until 8 September because of the gang violence.
The announcement by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) extends a ban on US flights to Port-au-Prince that began in November after gangs opened fire on three commercial planes. The initial ban was set to expire on Wednesday.
