Update: The confirmed victim count is now upto 17 Missionaries.
An armed gang kidnapped a group of 10 American missionaries from their church-run orphanage in Haiti’s north-west, local officials said on Monday. Officials have yet to track the kidnappers down and police have begun an investigation into the incident which happened on Saturday night at about 8 pm (2300 GMT).
The missionaries were taken as they were returning to the capital Port-au-Prince after providing humanitarian aid in Gonâve Island, located 40 kilometers (25 miles) west of Haiti’s main port city of Cap Haitien. “The kidnappers intercepted them along the road linking Miragoâne and Gonaïves somewhere between those two cities,” Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defence Network, told local media.
“We are still trying to determine what really happened because so far the testimonies of the victims are contradictory,” Esperance said, adding all of them were Haitian-Americans. The missionaries work for a Pentecostal church based in Idaho, according to another human rights worker who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.
“It’s scary because they have been kidnapped and we don’t know where they are,” Pastor Gary Heldreth, president of the Association of Baptists for World Evangelism told AFP from the US state of Virginia. “We have been in contact with the Haitian authorities as well as American officials to do everything we can to secure their release,” he said.