Americans spend another night in jail

16 Feb 2010, 11:42 am   -   Source: AAP
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Ten Americans charged with kidnapping in Haiti face another night in jail after a power cut delayed a ruling on their fate.

Ten Americans charged with kidnapping in Haiti faced another night in jail on Monday after a power cut delayed a ruling on their fate, as their ex-adviser was probed separately for sex trafficking.

Prosecutor Joseph Manes Louis said he finished writing his opinion on whether the Americans should be granted provisional release, but a power outage in quake-hit Haiti kept it from being printed and delivered to the judge.

The judge, who has final say in the case, left the court in the mid-afternoon - spending much of the day in darkness in his office and without running water in the building - and did not return before it shut down just before 5pm.

The Americans could now remain in detention until at least Wednesday because Tuesday is Carnival holiday, although festivities have been cancelled following last month's earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people.

Louis Gary Lissade, a lawyer for one of the American missionaries and a former Haitian justice minister, said he was disappointed by the delay.

"I was expecting at least something today," said Lissade. "Now we realise we still have to wait until Wednesday."

He said there was a possibility judicial officials could order the case looked at on Tuesday to move it along, but he believed that was unlikely.

Another lawyer, Alain Lemithe, said he was concerned their possible release could be derailed by a police investigation in El Salvador into their Dominican former legal adviser.

"I fear that. Sincerely, I fear that," he told AFP.

The adviser Jorge Puello, now back in the Dominican Republic, denied the allegations of sex trafficking and said anyway he had no contact with the Americans before their arrest on January 29.

Salvadoran police say Puello could actually be Jorge Torres Orellana, accused of running an international sex trafficking ring that lured women and girls from the Caribbean and Central America into prostitution with bogus offers of modelling jobs.

"They are accusing me of something that I don't even know myself," Puello told AFP. "It could happen that two people could have the same name. Whatever the case may be, I'm not afraid of anything."

The judge in the Americans' case, Bernard Saint-Vil, said he was looking into the Puello probe but could not yet say if it would form part of the Baptist missionaries' case.

"If at the end of the investigation we find that Mr Puello is a member of a certain criminal organisation that includes the Americans, we can always include it," he told AFP.

Puello's implication in such a case was an unwelcome turn of events for the Americans, who have been languishing in a Port-au-Prince jail for more than two weeks.

The group from the New Life Children's Refuge were caught trying to take a busload of 33 children they said they thought were orphans across the border into the Dominican Republican in the aftermath of the disastrous earthquake.

After it emerged that many of the children had parents, the Americans' lawyers sought to portray the Baptists as acting selflessly to help during Haiti's catastrophe.

Some of the parents have told the judge they willingly gave up their children because they were unable to care for them following the devastation wrought by the January 12 quake.

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