10 Americans charged with kidnapping in Haiti

Ten US Baptist missionaries have been charged with kidnapping for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti to a hastily arranged refuge just as officials were trying to protect children from predators in the chaos of a great earthquake.

The Haitian lawyer who represents the 10 Americans portrayed nine of his clients as innocents caught up in a scheme they did not understand.

But attorney Edwin Coq did not defend the actions of the group leader, Laura Silsby, though he continued to represent her.

"I'm going to do everything I can to get the nine out. They were naive. They had no idea what was going on and they did not know that they needed official papers to cross the border," Coq said.

"But Silsby did."

The Americans, most members of two Idaho churches, said they were rescuing abandoned children and orphans from a nation that Unicef says had 380,000 even before the catastrophic January 12 quake.

But at least two-thirds of the children, who range in age from 2 to 12, have parents who gave them away because they said the Americans promised the children a better life.

The investigating judge, who interviewed the missionaries, found sufficient evidence to charge them for trying to take the children across the border into the Dominican Republic on January 29 without documentation, Coq said.

Each was charged with one count of kidnapping, which carries a sentence of five to 15 years in prison, and one of criminal association, punishable by three to nine years.

Coq said the case would be assigned a judge and a verdict could take three months.

The magistrate, Mazard Fortil, left without making a statement.

Social Affairs Minister Jeanne Bernard Pierre, who has harshly criticised the missionaries, refused to comment.

The government's communications minister, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue, said only that the next court date had not been set.

US Ambassador Kenneth Merten showed up after 5 pm outside judicial police headquarters, where the Americans are being held and where President Rene Preval and top ministers now have temporary offices because theirs were destroyed in the quake.

"The US justice system cannot interfere in what's going on with these Americans right now," he told reporters. "The Haitian justice system will do what it has to do."

US consular officials have been making regular visits to the missionaries.

Earlier this week, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the Americans' behaviour "unfortunate whatever the motivation".

State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said the US was open to discuss "other legal avenues" for the defendants, an apparent reference to the Haitian prime minister's earlier suggestion that Haiti could consider sending the Americans back to the United States for prosecution.

It's unlikely the Americans could be tried back home, according to Christopher J. Schmidt, an expert on international child kidnapping law in St Louis, Missouri.