By DEBORAH SONTAG and WALT BOGDANICH, New York Times

LES CAYES, Haiti — When the earth shook vio­lently on Jan. 12, the inmates in this south­ern city’s squalid prison clam­ored to be released, scream­ing: “Help! We’re going to die in here.”

Else­where in Haiti, inmates were flee­ing largely unde­terred. But here, where the prison itself sus­tained lit­tle dam­age, there was no exit. Instead, con­di­tions wors­ened for the inmates, three-quarters of them pre­trial detainees, arrested on charges as petty as loi­ter­ing and locked up indef­i­nitely along­side con­victed felons.

After the earth­quake, guards roughed up the nois­i­est inmates and con­sol­i­dated them into cells so crowded their limbs tan­gled, for­mer pris­on­ers said. With after­shocks jan­gling nerves, the inmates slept in shifts on the ground, used buck­ets for toi­lets and plot­ted their escape.

The escape plan, set in motion on Jan. 19 by an attack on a guard, proved dis­as­trous. With Hait­ian and United Nations police offi­cers encir­cling the prison, the detainees could not get out. For hours, they ram­paged, hack­ing up doors and burn­ing records, until tear gas finally over­whelmed them.

In the end, after the Hait­ian police stormed the com­pound, dozens of inmates lay dead and wounded, their bod­ies strewn through the court­yard and crum­pled inside cells. The prison smol­dered, a blood-splattered mess.

Hait­ian offi­cials here say they did not use lethal force but rather found life­less bod­ies when they entered the prison. They attribute the killings to a prison ring­leader who, they say, slaugh­tered his fel­low inmates before hop­ping over the wall and disappearing.

But an inves­ti­ga­tion by The New York Times casts doubt on the offi­cial ver­sion of events and instead indi­cates that Hait­ian author­i­ties shot unarmed pris­on­ers and then sought to cover it up. Many of the bod­ies were buried in an unmarked grave.

Kesnel Jeudi, a recently released inmate, said in an inter­view that nobody was dead when the police rushed the prison. “They shouted: ‘Pris­on­ers, lie down. Lie down. Lie down,’ ” he said. “When the pris­on­ers lay down — while the pris­on­ers were lying down — they began firing.”

Mr. Jeudi, 28, said the police shoot­ings involved some set­tling of scores: “There were peo­ple they selected to kill.”

Four months later, the death toll remains unknown. But most accounts place it between 12 and 19, with up to 40 wounded. The local morgue atten­dant, Georges Ray­mond, said that he ini­tially reg­is­tered 11 dead detainees, with sev­eral more arriv­ing later after they died of bul­let wounds at the adja­cent hospital.

Prison offi­cials would not allow The Times to enter the walled prison com­pound, which sits directly behind the police sta­tion in the heart of town. But reporters inter­viewed six wit­nesses to the dis­tur­bance as well as five oth­ers who vis­ited the prison either imme­di­ately after the shoot­ings or the next day. None saw inmates fir­ing weapons or any evi­dence that inmates killed inmates. Instead, wit­nesses said the police shot unarmed pris­on­ers, some in the prison yard, oth­ers in their cells. After­ward, the author­i­ties failed to notify inmates’ rel­a­tives of the deaths, buried bod­ies with­out con­duct­ing autop­sies and burned the sur­viv­ing pris­on­ers’ blood­stained cloth­ing and shoes.

Myr­til Yonel, a human rights leader here, said, “For us, we con­sider this to be a massacre.”

Under a bare bulb in his office beside the prison, Olritch Beaubrun, the super­in­ten­dent of the antiriot police unit, scoffed at this accu­sa­tion. He said that a detainee nick­named Ti Mous­son had slaugh­tered inmates who resisted his escape plan.

“Ti Mous­son put down the 12 detainees,” Super­in­ten­dent Beaubrun said. “We did not. We never fired our guns.”

This asser­tion is at odds with what The Times found after review­ing con­fi­den­tial Hait­ian and United Nations reports and con­duct­ing inter­views with for­mer detainees, guards, prison cooks, war­dens, police offi­cials, judi­cial offi­cials and rel­a­tives of dead prisoners.

Among other things, United Nations police offi­cers noted that day in an inter­nal inci­dent report that the Hait­ian police had used firearms. The cooks, three women trapped inside dur­ing the riot, said that the detainees did no shoot­ing. No weapons were recov­ered. Ti Mous­son — whose real name is Luguens Cazeau — escaped. And the author­i­ties did not treat the prison as the crime scene of what they por­trayed as a mass mur­der by Mr. Cazeau, who was await­ing trial on charges of steal­ing a satel­lite dish.

The Hait­ian gov­ern­ment said that it was con­duct­ing three sep­a­rate inves­ti­ga­tions into the episode. But wit­nesses and oth­ers inter­viewed by The Times dur­ing two vis­its here last month said that they had never spo­ken to inves­ti­ga­tors. The inmates’ bod­ies had not been exhumed, and there was no indi­ca­tion that basic foren­sic evi­dence had ever been collected.

The detainees’ rel­a­tives say they feel not only bereft but also aban­doned. Dur­ing an inter­view, the widow of Abner Lisius — arrested on sus­pi­cions of steal­ing a cell­phone, now dead at 45 — wiped away tears. “My hus­band was mur­dered by the author­i­ties,” said Marie Michel Lau­rencin, the widow.

For four months, Amer­i­can and United Nations offi­cials have made no pub­lic com­ments about the killings at Les Cayes, say­ing they were urg­ing the Haitians to han­dle the mat­ter them­selves. But after The Times repeat­edly raised ques­tions about the case with Amer­i­can offi­cials, the United States Embassy sent a human rights offi­cer to Les Cayes.

The United Nations mis­sion chief in Haiti, Edmond Mulet, has now ordered the United Nations police com­mis­sioner here to begin an inde­pen­dent inquiry.

Last week, the United Nations spokesman in Haiti, David Wimhurst, expressed frus­tra­tion with the Hait­ian inves­ti­ga­tions to date, say­ing that “incom­plete and inac­cu­rate” offi­cial state­ments about what hap­pened in Les Cayes sug­gested a pos­si­ble cover-up.

“We’ve waited and waited for the gov­ern­ment to do its thing and now we’re going to do our thing,” Mr. Wimhurst said. “It’s a del­i­cate polit­i­cal busi­ness being in Haiti and sup­port­ing the gov­ern­ment. We’re not here to under­mine them, but nor are we here to turn a blind eye to gross human rights violations.”

A Frag­ile Jus­tice System

How Haiti now deals with the killings in Les Cayes offers a test case for this country’s com­mit­ment to human rights at a time when the world is poised to help rebuild its trou­bled jus­tice sys­tem after the earth­quake. The State Depart­ment and the Agency for Inter­na­tional Devel­op­ment have requested $141.3 mil­lion for that purpose.

For 15 years, on and off, the inter­na­tional com­mu­nity has invested in Haiti’s police, courts and pris­ons as a way to shore up its frag­ile democ­racy. The effort began in late 1994 when the Hait­ian Army, long an instru­ment of polit­i­cal ter­ror, was disbanded.

“After many years of dic­ta­tor­ship, there was no inde­pen­dent police force and no inde­pen­dent judi­ciary, and the pris­ons were hell­holes,” said William G. O’Neill, direc­tor of the Con­flict Pre­ven­tion and Peace Forum at the Social Sci­ence Research Coun­cil. “The goal was to cre­ate insti­tu­tions that would respect human rights and allow the rule of law to flourish.”

But to date the inter­na­tional invest­ment, focused on police and judi­cial train­ing in an offi­cial cul­ture rife with cor­rup­tion and crony­ism, has net­ted mod­est returns. Haiti’s cor­rec­tions sys­tem has made few gains.

Before the earth­quake, the country’s 17 pris­ons “fell far short of inter­na­tional stan­dards,” the Hait­ian gov­ern­ment acknowl­edged in a post-disaster needs assess­ment. Pris­ons were dilap­i­dated and severely over­crowded; guards, far fewer than needed, were poorly equipped. And — the per­sis­tent core prob­lem — most detainees were held in pro­longed pre­trial deten­tion, often for minor crimes or for things like com­mer­cial debt, witch­craft and werewolfery.

“Under­stand, you can be arrested in Haiti for prac­ti­cally noth­ing,” said Mau­rice D. Geiger, an Amer­i­can con­trac­tor work­ing on jus­tice reform in Haiti. “And once you are arrested and go to prison, it is not only pos­si­ble but likely that you will stay there for an extended period of time with­out see­ing a judge.”

Pris­ons were widely viewed as “pow­der kegs await­ing a spark,” as a 2007 report by the Inter­na­tional Cri­sis Group put it. And the earth­quake pro­vided it.

On Jan. 12, the largest prison in the coun­try, the national pen­i­ten­tiary in Port-au-Prince, emp­tied com­pletely not long after a sec­tion of its sur­round­ing wall col­lapsed. Guards fled along with inmates, includ­ing a few hun­dred pris­on­ers con­sid­ered a seri­ous risk to the country’s security.

Look­ing back, police offi­cials said they should have antic­i­pated a “con­ta­gion” of escape attempts at other pris­ons after that.

Panic After a Quake

In Les Cayes, Haiti’s third largest city, the earth­quake was far less destruc­tive than in Port-au-Prince. But the earth did shake, vio­lently and lat­er­ally. And, although chil­dren at an orphan­age in the city mar­veled at how the trees danced, adults pan­icked, dash­ing into the streets, scream­ing, crying.

Inside the prison com­plex, where cor­rod­ing con­crete cell­blocks frame a des­o­late court­yard, inmates hollered, try­ing to wrench open the doors to their cells.

Built in the 19th cen­tury, the prison held 467 detainees in 14 cells that day, more than four times its intended capac­ity. The ruckus was ear-splitting. When the inmates did not quiet down, Pierre Eddy Char­lot, the super­vi­sor, called in rein­force­ments from the adja­cent police sta­tion and the United Nations police unit sta­tioned in town.

“Mea­sures were taken to pre­vent the worst,” Mr. Char­lot scrib­bled in a memo that night.

Accord­ing to pris­on­ers released after the dis­tur­bance, those mea­sures included an effort to silence forcibly the trou­ble­mak­ers. Mr. Jeudi said he watched the guards remove the nois­i­est detainees from their cells, beat them with batons and then cram them into a few par­tic­u­larly crowded units. Twice-a-day bath­room priv­i­leges were eliminated.

Ten­sions esca­lated. “The pris­on­ers were riled up,” said one for­mer detainee, recently released. The young man spoke on the con­di­tion of anonymity, fear­ing reprisals. “When they beat us, we said, ‘Damn,’ ” he said. “Now, you know pris­on­ers. We tried to make a plan to get out.”

Cell 3 was plan­ning cen­tral, home to Mr. Cazeau, or Ti Mous­son, who had been roughed up by a guard after the quake, accord­ing to for­mer detainees. The inmates in that cell got busy, dig­ging holes in the walls, sharp­en­ing a tooth­brush to a fine point.

Their plot­ting was no secret. “There was a guy in Cell 3, a for­mer police offi­cer,” Mr. Jeudi said. “Two days before the prison fell apart, he was in the cell when Ti Mous­son counted who was with him and who was not. So that guy asked for the war­den and informed on what the pris­on­ers were plan­ning. And the war­den did nothing.”

After the earth­quake, the war­den, Inspec­tor Sylvestre Larack, put out a “max­i­mum alert” call­ing his 29 guards back to duty. But on Jan. 19, with much of Les Cayes still in a post-quake state of emer­gency, only five guards showed up to work inside the prison.

In the early after­noon, when the cells were to be opened for the dump­ing of the waste buck­ets, Inspec­tor Larack left to put gas in his car, said Mr. Yonel, the south­ern regional direc­tor of Haiti’s Net­work for the Defense of Human Rights. Given the long lines at the ser­vice sta­tions, this was bound to take time.

For the escape plan­ners, “the stars had aligned,” Mr. Yonel said.

A Cell Erupts

Thélè­maque Guer­son, the guard with the keys, found noth­ing out of the ordi­nary when he unlocked Cell 1 and then Cell 2.

When he opened Cell 3, how­ever, dozens of detainees “formed a coali­tion and pushed out together at the same time,” he said in an inter­view. They threw a bucket of urine at him and pounced, fists first. Mr. Cazeau grabbed him by the chest, say­ing, “Give me the prison keys.” Mr. Guer­son, 28, said he threw the keys in the hopes that the other guards would retrieve them.

The other guards, how­ever, “must have been dis­tracted,” said an inter­nal United Nations report. That report said it was a United Nations police offi­cer patrolling the prison roof who first spied the detainees attack­ing Mr. Guerson.

Mr. Guer­son said he strug­gled, but, out­num­bered, could not stand his ground. He was stabbed in the head and neck with the sharp­ened tooth­brush. Finally, he man­aged to extri­cate him­self and ran out the front gate. All the other guards fled, too, and they did not lock the door after themselves.

The inmates con­trolled the prison.

Key ring in hand, Mr. Cazeau opened cell after cell. Inmates poured into the yard. Some rushed the front door. But by this point, United Nations offi­cers and sol­diers, who had formed a perime­ter around the com­pound, blocked the entrance, point­ing their guns. Detainees with­drew back inside, where they eas­ily found the tools to vent their frus­tra­tions, like propane tanks to set fires and pick­axes to chop up the doors.

Although pris­ons are not sup­posed to keep firearms, and espe­cially not unse­cured firearms, the inmates also found a cou­ple of old guns in the clerk’s office, accord­ing to some accounts. Mr. Guer­son and the for­mer detainees said they thought the guns either did not work or did not have ammunition.

The police sta­tion stands directly in front of the prison. Super­in­ten­dent Beaubrun, who runs the Depart­men­tal Unit for the Main­te­nance of Order, said that he was sit­ting out front under a tamarind tree when he heard a blast — “Boom!” Run­ning toward the noise — its ori­gin unclear — he saw Mr. Guer­son dash out, his head bleeding.

Still, Super­in­ten­dent Beaubrun said, the police could not inter­vene with­out orders from his supe­rior, whom he said he had dif­fi­culty reach­ing by cellphone.

So while the inmates ran­sacked the prison, the guards were out­side, the police were out­side and the United Nations offi­cers were out­side, too. “We spent three hours dis­cussing what to do,” Super­in­ten­dent Beaubrun said.

Han­dling a riot is a del­i­cate affair for prison offi­cials. Inter­na­tional stan­dards encour­age the use of medi­a­tion and non­lethal restraint; law enforce­ment offi­cers are sup­posed to use lethal force only after all other means have been exhausted. Hait­ian offi­cials ordered the United Nations offi­cers, who were bet­ter equipped, to enter the prison and open fire on the pris­on­ers, accord­ing to the United Nations report. The United Nations offi­cers, most from a Sene­galese police unit, vehe­mently refused.

“It was not right!” Abdou Mbengue, the report­ing offi­cer for the Sene­galese, said at his office here last month. His com­man­der, Lt. Col. Ababacar Sadikh Niang, said that they were not autho­rized to dis­cuss the mat­ter but added, emphat­i­cally, “It must be said that the Sene­galese did not fire a sin­gle shot.”

Hait­ian offi­cials blamed the United Nations offi­cers’ “indif­fer­ence” for allow­ing the sit­u­a­tion to escalate.

Offi­cer Mbengue, in turn, in a report that he wrote the night of the shoot­ings, deplored “the ama­teurism, the lack of seri­ous­ness and the irre­spon­si­bil­ity of the Hait­ian National Police offi­cers.” The senior police offi­cial in the region — Super­in­ten­dent Beaubrun’s boss — did not arrive on the scene for more than an hour, he wrote.

With night falling, Super­in­ten­dent Beaubrun said, the police grew con­cerned about three female prison cooks who they believed had been taken hostage inside the prison. “They were scream­ing: ‘Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me. Don’t kill me,’ ” he said.

The three women, inter­viewed while cook­ing out­side the prison last month, said they never feared that the detainees would kill them. They said that some detainees con­sid­ered using them “as a shield” if the police came in but that oth­ers did not per­mit that. Gen­er­ally, the detainees were pro­tec­tive of them and did not threaten or harm them, the cooks said.

“Because we used to take good care of the detainees, maybe that’s why they did not try to hurt us,” said one, Marie Flo­rence Degan, as she tended a huge metal ket­tle of rice and beans over a wood fire.

Around 5 p.m., Hait­ian police offi­cials decided to enter the prison com­pound. They used tear gas first, hurl­ing 30 grenades that had been given to them by the Sene­galese officers.

“A lot of gas,” Mr. Jeudi said. “Myself, per­son­ally, I took a T-shirt, wrapped it around my nose and put tooth­paste around my mouth” to com­bat the effects. “I was crying.”

Detainees ran into the infir­mary and hid in cells. Some escaped, climb­ing up and over the walls or through holes they had dug. Mr. Cazeau, the ring­leader, fled in plain view, using a prison lad­der, accord­ing to a report by Mr. Yonel’s human rights group.

The Police Take Over

By the time the police pen­e­trated the north­ern wall to enter the prison, the detainees had been over­come by the gas and were breath­ing hard, for­mer detainees said.

The prison warden’s report said the police, accom­pa­nied by guards, were greeted by “a hail­storm of rocks and ammu­ni­tion com­ing from the detainees.”

The cooks said the detainees never fired a shot. “No detainees did any shoot­ing,” one of the cooks, Charita Milien, said. No offi­cers were killed, and none were wounded by gun­fire, accord­ing to police reports.

On enter­ing, the warden’s report said, offi­cers found on the ground “detainees who had been exe­cuted by the lead­ers of the move­ment for refus­ing to cooperate.”

But two cooks said that they saw no dead detainees on the ground at the moment the police arrived. And, like other detainees inter­viewed, Mr. Jeudi said, “No one was killed before the police entered the prison.”

Super­in­ten­dent Beaubrun said that the detainees’ account could not be trusted. “The detainees were arrested by us,” he said. “They will never say good things about us. Escape is good for them. If you pre­vent them from escap­ing, they won’t like you.”

Mr. Jeudi and other for­mer detainees said the police entered fir­ing. “When they started to shoot, peo­ple were scream­ing and cry­ing,” Mr. Jeudi said. Many detainees dropped face­down on the ground and laced their fin­gers behind their heads.

One middle-aged for­mer pris­oner said he was stand­ing on the side­lines try­ing to calm Fre­dely Percy, a 27-year-old inmate serv­ing time for mar­i­juana pos­ses­sion. “My friend, Fre­dely, was stand­ing next to me and we were dis­cussing what to do,” the for­mer pris­oner said in an inter­view. “At that moment, I heard ‘Pow,’ and he got hit and fell down.”

Another for­mer detainee, a scrappy man in his 20s, said, in bro­ken Eng­lish: “They shoot a lot of peo­ple. There was a lot of blood on me. Blood, blood. Every­body in the prison have blood on them.”

He said the police shot indis­crim­i­nately. “All them peo­ple they killed, it’s not even like they were going to escape,” he said. “They just shoot them. Like they ner­vous, they shoot people.”

Mr. Yonel said he believed that some of the vic­tims were sin­gled out. A for­mer pris­oner said that the police exe­cuted one of the ring­lead­ers, a man serv­ing a life sen­tence for mur­der, after the sit­u­a­tion had calmed. The offi­cers found the man in his cell, took him into the infir­mary, beat him and shot him, the for­mer inmate said.

“They decided because he had escaped death ear­lier to kill him,” the for­mer inmate said. He added, “They never liked him.”

A Priest’s Witness

The next day, the Rev. Marc Boisvert, an Amer­i­can priest who runs a large orphan­age on the out­skirts of town, heard about the prison vio­lence from a radio report. Father Boisvert, a for­mer United States Navy chap­lain, has oper­ated a voca­tional pro­gram at the prison for years, train­ing con­victs to be tai­lors. He imme­di­ately got in his car and drove to the prison.

“It was a real mess,” he said. “The place was still smoldering.”

The war­den, Inspec­tor Larack, wel­comed him, he said. “They brought me in to see the dam­age that had been caused by the pris­on­ers,” Father Boisvert said. “Espe­cially they wanted to show me the bad side: ‘The pris­on­ers did this. Imag­ine that. Look at the holes in the walls. Look at the ceil­ings. They burnt the kitchen out.’ ”

Well before the riot, con­di­tions at the prison were “sub­hu­man,” Father Boisvert said. After the riot, with more than 400 pris­on­ers locked down in five or six small cells, the con­di­tions became “seri­ously inhu­mane,” he said.

Father Boisvert found sev­eral wounded detainees lan­guish­ing with­out med­ical treatment.

One detainee showed him the pel­lets in his back from a shot­gun blast; he said he had been shot at close range, through the bars of his cell. Another detainee, shot by a small-caliber hand­gun, was writhing in pain, a bul­let lodged in his chest. A third had a bloody eye that appeared to be from a bul­let cas­ing being ejected, Father Boisvert said.

In the prison yard, one inmate lay cata­tonic on a bare mat­tress, appar­ently in shock from what he had wit­nessed, Father Boisvert said.

“It was crazy,” he said. “Peo­ple just lost it. Peo­ple with guns lost it, and other peo­ple lost their lives.”

After Father Boisvert vol­un­teered to pro­vide food to the detainees, he gained rel­a­tively free access to the prison, and pris­on­ers began telling him what had happened.

“They all claim that when the shoot­ing started, they had their hands up and were sur­ren­der­ing,” he said. “That the shoot­ing seemed to be at close range, through bars into cells where the peo­ple inside had nowhere to go.

“Essen­tially, when the author­i­ties finally got their act together, they came in full force and shot peo­ple indis­crim­i­nately in their cells,” he said.

Like Father Boisvert, Ms. Lau­rencin, 42, also heard about the dis­tur­bance at the prison on the radio. She said she was not wor­ried about her hus­band, Mr. Lisius, the father of her three daugh­ters and a cab­i­net­maker by trade. In prison since Novem­ber with­out hav­ing seen a judge, he was too timid to have taken part in an upris­ing, she said.

Ms. Lau­rencin said she pre­pared his favorite dish — fish and plan­tains — and took it to the prison. But the guards would not let her in. The next day, she returned twice, and the sec­ond time she made her way into the yard where she saw pris­on­ers on their knees. They called to her: “Your hus­band is dead.”

Stunned, Ms. Lau­rencin went to the morgue to look for her husband’s body. What she saw then haunts her now, she said: a bul­let hole in his caved-in head, and his rot­ted entrails spilling out. He was too dam­aged for a proper funeral, she said, so she and a cou­ple of friends buried him them­selves in the town cemetery.

Since his death, the author­i­ties have never con­tacted her, she said last month.

Grue­some Photographs

On Jan. 19, after the prison was calmed, a United Nations offi­cer took pic­tures inside the com­pound. Those pho­tographs, closely guarded by the United Nations, appear to be the only doc­u­men­tary evi­dence of the killings.

They show bod­ies in the prison yard and bod­ies in cells, accord­ing to three peo­ple who have viewed them. Sev­eral bod­ies bear mul­ti­ple gun­shot wounds. The images are grue­some, said Mr. Geiger, the Amer­i­can con­trac­tor work­ing in Haiti on a jus­tice reform project.

Mr. Geiger, a for­mer Jus­tice Depart­ment offi­cial, said that a pic­ture of two bod­ies slumped inside one cell, and a third, half in, half out, most dis­turbed him. “Unarmed pris­on­ers in a cell are not a dan­ger to any­body,” he said. “Any com­pe­tent and respon­si­ble prison author­ity knows how to take care of a sit­u­a­tion where peo­ple in a cell are dis­turb­ing, hol­ler­ing or whatever.”

After the episode was over, prison offi­cials sum­moned the local jus­tice of the peace, Michel Seide, “to cer­tify the dam­age incurred in the course of the riot,” accord­ing to the warden’s inci­dent report.

When Mr. Seide stepped inside, he imme­di­ately saw two bod­ies on the ground, “one with a big hole in his head, next to his neck,” he said in an inter­view. The other bod­ies lay scat­tered through the main yard, he said. He counted a total of 10, none inside cells, he said. He said he did not know if bod­ies had been moved before his arrival.

While he was writ­ing a report, a truck arrived to col­lect the bod­ies, he said, and the author­i­ties asked a cou­ple of pris­on­ers in good stand­ing to help move them.

One was Mr. Jeudi, who was just com­plet­ing a five-year sen­tence for armed rob­bery. He said that he trans­ported a dozen dead detainees to the hos­pi­tal, includ­ing one found out­side the com­pound, appar­ently shot while escaping.

“I car­ried 12 cadav­ers,” Mr. Jeudi said. “I was sick about it.”

Mr. Jeudi said he also fer­ried eight wounded detainees to the hospital.

After the bod­ies had been removed, Alix Civil, the local pros­e­cu­tor, arrived at the scene, which he described in an inter­view as “a cat­a­strophic sit­u­a­tion.” He said he saw dam­aged walls, bro­ken cell doors and blood every­where — details not included in the report he received from the jus­tice of the peace.

“A lot of things were miss­ing from that report,” Mr. Civil said. “It was writ­ten only to please the chief of the prison.”

He ordered Mr. Seide to redo his report. Mr. Seide said that he inter­viewed hos­pi­tal­ized detainees who told him the police shot them, but he would not divulge the con­clu­sion of his sec­ond report, which could form the basis for a local pros­e­cu­tion of the officers.

A few days after the shoot­ings, Antoinetta Dor­ci­nat arrived at the morgue just in time to retrieve the body of Mr. Percy, her boyfriend. Ms. Dor­ci­nat said she gave the morgue atten­dant a bribe of $6.50 “so they wouldn’t throw Fre­dely away with the others.”

Mr. Yonel, the human rights leader, said the morgue sent 11 bod­ies to the local ceme­tery. He said that the ceme­tery care­taker showed him the muddy clear­ing where the bod­ies had been buried.

Detainees’ rel­a­tives were not noti­fied before the bur­ial. Lisette Charles said she still did not know where her 21-year-old son, Jack­lyn Charles, was buried.

“I didn’t know about what hap­pened until about five days after­ward,” Ms. Charles said. “I was told sev­eral of them were put in large zip­pered body bags and piled up at the ceme­tery. I don’t know what hole they buried him in.”

After word spread, Mr. Yonel said, detainees’ rel­a­tives kept show­ing up at his office, a cub­by­hole with books and files piled high, ask­ing: “Why? Why? Why?” Over 26 days, his staff inves­ti­gated, con­clud­ing that the police killed the detainees with­out jus­ti­fi­ca­tion, and he deliv­ered his find­ings to the local author­i­ties. “I went before the court and said: ‘You have to have an inves­ti­ga­tion. You can’t just let this pass,’ ” he said.

But many months did pass, dur­ing which the only thing that hap­pened was that Inspec­tor Larack was trans­ferred to the top war­den job in the coun­try at the national pen­i­ten­tiary in Port-au-Prince, which is slowly fill­ing back up with prisoners.

At the pen­i­ten­tiary, Inspec­tor Larack declined to dis­cuss the vio­lence under his watch. He wel­comed reporters into the prison’s rubble-strewn court­yard, “my new office.” But he turned rigid when the episode in Les Cayes was raised. He blocked a video cam­era with his hand — “Stop!” he said — and demanded the videotape.

A Police Report

A cou­ple of weeks later, the Hait­ian National Police inspec­tor general’s office com­pleted its inves­ti­ga­tion of the dis­tur­bance in Les Cayes and rec­om­mended Inspec­tor Larack’s demo­tion. The inves­ti­ga­tion focused on only prison offi­cials. The police were not ques­tioned, judg­ing by a con­fi­den­tial inspec­tor general’s report. The cat­a­lyst for the inquiry appeared to be grow­ing con­cern about the prison escapes across the coun­try — and not con­cern about the deaths at Les Cayes.

The inspec­tor gen­eral, Fritz Jean, blamed Inspec­tor Larack for fail­ing to take steps to pre­vent the dis­tur­bance. He also accused him of lying to inves­ti­ga­tors about who shot the detainees by accus­ing Mr. Cazeau of mass murder.

The detainees were actu­ally killed, the inspec­tor general’s report said, after Mr. Cazeau, the ring­leader, escaped and the police entered the prison.

The inspec­tor general’s report does not raise any ques­tions about the police shoot­ings and whether they were jus­ti­fied. It con­cludes that the police and prison offi­cials did “estimable work” and should be com­mended for pre­vent­ing a major­ity of the pris­on­ers from fleeing.

Shown a copy of the inspec­tor general’s report, Mr. O’Neill, who served as an adviser to Haiti’s jus­tice reform effort for many years, said it looked like “a whitewash.”

A cru­cial com­po­nent of the jus­tice reform effort in Haiti has been to wipe out a cul­ture of impunity, “where gov­ern­ment offi­cials lit­er­ally could get away with mur­der,” Mr. O’Neill said.

“If things like this can hap­pen in a state-run insti­tu­tion, and it’s not han­dled prop­erly, that’s a very bad prece­dent for the future,” he said. “If who­ever killed these peo­ple are not brought to jus­tice, it sets a bad tone for post-earthquake reconstruction.”

Sen­a­tor Patrick J. Leahy, the Ver­mont Demo­c­rat who is chair­man of the Sen­ate Judi­ciary Com­mit­tee and the Appro­pri­a­tions sub­com­mit­tee that finances for­eign aid pro­grams, said that how Haiti ulti­mately han­dled the case in Les Cayes would show if it was seri­ous about justice.

“Absent the will to see jus­tice done,” Mr. Leahy said, “we should not waste our money.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/23/world/americas/23haiti.html