10 Americans in Haiti Are Charged With Abduction

By MARC LACEY
Published: February 4, 2010
PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Ten Americans detained after trying to take 33 Haitian children across the border last week were charged Thursday with abduction and criminal association, according to prosecutors.
The charges, which carry prison terms of up to 15 years, were announced after a closed-door court hearing in which prosecutors questioned the Americans, most of them members of a Baptist congregation from Idaho. The case has become a flashpoint for Haiti’s fears of foreign encroachment in the aftermath of the Jan. 12 earthquake.
After the hearing, the Americans were led from the capital city’s white central courthouse and back to jail. They did not speak to the crush of reporters or photographers massed outside the building to cover the case.
Before the hearing, Laura Silsby, who had helped organize the group’s mission to Haiti, sounded a hopeful note as she waited to be taken into court, saying, “We’re just trusting God for a positive outcome.”
Edwin Coq, a lawyer for the Baptists, had said that 9 of his 10 clients were “completely innocent,” but that, in an apparent reference to Ms. Silsby, “if the judiciary were to keep one, it could be the leader of the group.”
“I’m trying to get them all free but I don’t yet know what’s going to happen,” Mr. Coq said in an interview at his earthquake-damaged law offices in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.
The Americans were arrested on Friday as they tried to take 33 Haitian children to what they had said was an orphanage in the Dominican Republic. A Web site for the orphanage said that children there would stay in a “loving Christian home-like environment” and be eligible for adoption.
The Americans, their lawyers and members of their churches have said they are innocent of any wrongdoing, and said the case was a huge misunderstanding. In an interview earlier this week, Ms. Silsby said the group had come to Haiti to rescue children orphaned by the earthquake, and that “our hearts were in the right place.”
But several of the 33 children had at least one living parent, and some of those parents said that the Baptists had promised simply to educate the youngsters in the Dominican Republic and said the children would be able to return to Haiti to visit their families.
Some Haitian leaders have called the Americans kidnappers, but until Thursday, Haitian judicial officials had left open the possibility that the group could be returned to the United States for possible trial, sparing Haiti’s crippled justice system a high-profile criminal prosecution fraught with diplomatic and political land mines.
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