Médecins sans frontières (Doctors Without Borders) says its Haitian mission is compromised after law enforcement officers and members of a vigilante group executed at least two patients outside a Port-au-Prince hospital.
Haitian police on Monday stopped an MSF ambulance transporting “three young people with gunshot wounds” about 100 metres from the MSF hospital in the Drouillard area of the capital, said Claudia Blume, a spokesperson for the independent international medical relief organization. Police forced the ambulance to go instead to Hôpital La Paix, a public hospital.
“Once there, law enforcement officers and members of a self-defence group surrounded the ambulance, slashed the tires, and tear-gassed MSF personnel inside the vehicle to force them out,” the statement says. “They then took the wounded patients a short distance away, outside the hospital grounds, where at least two of them were executed.”
This attack “seriously calls into question MSF’s ability to continue delivering essential care to the Haitian population, which is in dire need,” said MSF head of mission Christophe Garnier, quoted in the statement.
“Our teams and our patients need a minimum level of safety to continue providing medical care,” he said.
The statement says that MSF staff “were violently attacked, insulted, tear-gassed, threatened with death, and held against their will for more than four hours before being allowed to leave” in the incident. “The MSF ambulance was damaged and left unable to drive, so the team departed in a second vehicle.”
The U.S. Federal Aviation Administration on Tuesday prohibited U.S. airlines from flying to Haiti for 30 days after gangs shot three planes. The United Nations also temporarily suspended flights to Port-au-Prince, limiting humanitarian aid coming into the country.
The shootings were part of a wave of violence that erupted as the country plagued by gang violence swore in its new prime minister on Monday after a politically tumultuous process.
With a report from the Associated Press