Here is an update, since i reported on this story earlier...
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — The judge presiding over the case of 10 American missionaries accused of kidnapping Haitian children has requested that they be freed.
"I'm asking that they drop the charges and that they be released," Judge Bernard Saint-Vil said outside the courthouse where he has spent the week questioning the Baptists.
Saint-Vil said he privately questioned the last of a group of Haitian parents who said they willingly gave their children to the missionaries to educate and care for them.
"After listening to the families, I see the possibility that they can all be released," he said.
Saint-Vil said his request to free the missionaries was forwarded to the prosecutor-general's office, which can object. But he said he intends to accept a request from the group's lawyers to free the Americans while an investigation of the case continues.
The judge said the Americans, most of whom belong to an Idaho Southern Baptist church, would have to make themselves available for future questioning. He did not say whether they would have to remain in Haiti.
Jean-René Tessier, a lawyer representing the missionaries, said the Americans may be allowed to return home.
"That depends on the judge," he said.
The Americans were charged last week with child kidnapping after being arrested Jan. 29 with a busload of 33 children, ages 2 to 12, whom they were bringing to an orphanage set up with church donations in the Dominican Republic.
They said they had proper paperwork and permission from the families, and were merely doing what hundreds of other groups in Haiti were doing — saving children from a terrible existence. But thousands more Haitian children leave the country illicitly each year, according to the United Nations Children's Fund, and are forced into difficult jobs, used as sex slaves or sold on the black market for adoption.
The pastor of the Meridian, Idaho, church attended by several of the detainees said he had yet to receive any official word on their release.
"Our confidence continues to remain, both in our faith and in our attorneys that represent our people," said Pastor Clint Henry of Central Valley Baptist Church. "Now we wait and pray, believing that in the coming hours we will receive the news we have waited for."
From behind cell bars in a grimy jail where they have been held, the missionaries declined to be interviewed Wednesday. The women were held separately from the men, who shared their cell with nine Haitian men, some of whom played checkers on the cell floor.
"We've said all we're going to say for now. We don't want to talk now," group leader Laura Silsby said.
Contributing: The Associated Press
No comments:
Post a Comment