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.
