In Haiti, UN recov­ers 2 high-powered weapons taken dur­ing attack
The Asso­ci­ated Press

Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 12, 2007

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti

Res­i­dents of a gang-controlled slum sur­ren­dered two high-powered rifles Fri­day, three weeks after the weapons were removed from a U.N. armored per­son­nel car­rier that came under attack.

U.N. peace­keep­ers were dri­ving through the sea­side Cite Soleil slum on Dec. 21 when their vehi­cle broke down. The troops tried to fix it but came under heavy fire from unknown assailants and fled in another armored vehicle.

U.N. troops and Hait­ian police raided the slum the next day in a pre­vi­ously planned oper­a­tion and killed at least six peo­ple. They found the aban­doned armored vehi­cle burned and stripped of its M-50 assault rifle and another large cal­iber firearm.

In a brief hand-over Fri­day, the 4-foot-long (1.2-meter-long) weapons were loaded onto a pickup truck and taken to a U.N. base under escort by Fil­ipino peace­keep­ers as AP jour­nal­ists and dozens of onlook­ers watched.

“We’re turn­ing over the guns, so now we want peace,” said Frantz Mar Guer­rier of the Cite Soleil Devel­op­ment Com­mit­tee, which said it orga­nized the weapons hand over. “We always intended to return them, as that was the will of the community.”

A U.N. spokes­woman declined to com­ment Fri­day evening, say­ing she had not inde­pen­dently con­firmed the hand over.

Guer­rier said the weapons were taken “out of frus­tra­tion over the killings of our peo­ple by Minus­tah,” using the acronym for the U.N. peace­keep­ing mis­sion in Haiti.

The United Nations said the six peo­ple killed in the Dec. 22 raid were later iden­ti­fied as gang mem­bers wanted for a string of recent kid­nap­pings. How­ever, Cite Soleil res­i­dents said 10 peo­ple were killed and that all were civilians.

U.N. peace­keep­ers had no casualties.

The U.N. weapons can only be fired when con­nected to the armored vehi­cle. Their loss was an embar­rass­ment for the 8,800-strong U.N. force, which has strug­gled to rout armed gangs that flour­ished in the after­math of a Feb­ru­ary 2004 revolt that top­pled for­mer Pres­i­dent Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

U.N. troops and gangs wage fre­quent gun­bat­tles in Cite Soleil, a bullet-scarred slum of 200,000 peo­ple who live mostly in squalid, dirt-floor hov­els or scrap-metal shacks.