Port-au-Prince: Ten American Baptists were
being held in the Haitian capital on Sunday after trying take 33
children out of Haiti at a time of growing fears over possible
child trafficking.
The church members, most from Idaho, said they were
trying to rescue abandoned and traumatised children. But
officials said they lacked the proper documents when they were
arrested Friday night in a bus along with children from 2
months to 12 years old who had survived the catastrophic
earthquake.
The group said its "Haitian Orphan Rescue Mission" was an
effort to help abandoned children by taking them to an
orphanage across the border in the Dominican Republic.
"In this chaos the government is in right now we were
just trying to do the right thing," the group`s spokeswoman,
Laura Silsby, told The Associated Press at the judicial police
headquarters in the capital, where the Americans were being
held pending a hearing tomorrow before a judge.
The children, some of them sick and dehydrated, were
taken to an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children`s
Villages, which was trying to find their parents or close
relatives, said a spokesman there, George Willeit.
"One child, an 8- or 9-year-old, said she thought she was
going to some sort of summer or vacation camp in the Dominican
Republic," Willeit said.
The Baptist group planned to scoop up 100 kids and take
them by bus to a 45-room hotel at Cabarete, a beach resort in
the Dominican Republic, that they were converting into an
orphanage, Silsby said to a news agency.
PTI
