Concern is deepening for the plight of an Irish missionary and eight other people including a child, who have been kidnapped by gunmen in Haiti.
By James Blears in Mexico City
Gena Heraty, who runs the St Helene Orphanage near Haiti’s Capital Port Au Prince, was kidnapped on Sunday along with a three year old child and seven of her staff.
The orphanage cares for more than 200 children and is renowned for its kind, loving and dedicated work. Authorities say that the kidnappers broke through an outer wall and then headed straight for the main building in the compound, executing a carefully crafted plan.
Gena Heraty has been on mission in Haiti since 1993, helping young and often vulnerable children.
Aware for years of the deteriorating situation, the crisis and the risks involved, she has bravely said: ”The children are why I’m still here. I’ve no intention whatsoever of leaving, because we’re all in this together.”
Lawlessness and gang violence plague Haiti, the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation. The United Nations says that more than eighty percent of the Capital Port Au Prince is under the stranglehold control of the street gangs and organized crime.
Kidnapping is an everyday, commonplace crime in Haiti, often aimed at gaining large sums of cash for guns and other equipment.
Nations, especially those from the Caribbean, have sent police officers to Haiti, to bolster its fragile security forces. But no major nation has yet offered it a troop reinforcement to form a peacekeeping operation.
Haiti wants to hold Presidential elections, but this isn’t currently possible due to widespread instability.
