US missionaries charged with child abduction in Haiti

Ten American Baptists who tried to take 33 Haitian children across the border to the Dominican Republic have been charged with abduction and criminal association.

Haitian Deputy Prosecutor Jean Ferge Joseph announced the charges on Thursday and said that the case was being sent to an investigative judge. The charges carry prison terms of up to 15 years. After the announcement, the US missionaries were led back to their prison cells.

Last Friday, the team of missionaries, made up mostly of members from an Idaho Baptist church, was arrested while trying to take a bus full of Haitian children across the border. The leader of the Baptist team, Laura Silsby, 40, said they were bringing the children to a 45-room hotel in the Dominican Republic, where they would stay until a permanent orphanage could be constructed.

Silsby said plans for building an orphanage in the Dominican Republic for Haitian children were in place before the 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck the Caribbean island on January 12. The hundreds of thousands dead and millions homeless prompted the group to move quicker on their plan to establish an orphanage, she said.

But Haitian officials say the team lacked the proper documents to transport the children out of the country. With thousands of Haitian children having lost their parents and many wandering the streets, the government has clamped down on the movement of children across its borders over fears of child trafficking. As a preventative measure, Prime Minister Max Bellerive must personally authorise the departure of a child from the country.

Some of the children's parents said in interviews that they were told the children would be taken to a place in the Dominican Republic where they would be educated and then be able to return to Haiti to help their families.

But the website for the orphanage said the children would be eligible for adoption, raising concerns over whether the Haitian parents were given the correct information.

US State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said on Wednesday that the United States was not seeking to interfere in the case, contradicting Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who earlier said that Washington was in talks with the Haitian government over the case.