Two of 10 Americans charged with kidnapping in Haiti have returned to jail after a judge said he would visit the orphanage where they claimed they planned to take the kids, a lawyer said.
Judge Bernard Saint-Vil had Wednesday freed the other eight Americans without bail and they returned to the United States, but he ordered Laura Silsby and Charisa Coulter to remain in the country for further questioning.
He wants to question them regarding their previous visit to Haiti in December. Their lawyer Aviol Fleurant said they visited an orphanage in the country's northeast to deliver toys and school materials during that visit.
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The judge also plans to go to the orphanage Silsby was setting up in the Dominican Republic, said Fleurant.
"The judge wants to see with his own eyes the orphanage in the Dominican Republic," he said, adding he would question its administrator, Jose Ovando Hidalgo, and that it was located in Cabarete.
Fleurant said the judge also plans to question a church pastor who runs the orphanage the Americans said they visited in Haiti's northeast city of Ouanaminthe.
The judge could not question the two Americans on Thursday as planned because their interpreter was ill, said Fleurant. Another hearing was scheduled for Friday morning.
The American Baptist missionaries from the New Life Children's Refuge were arrested on January 29 trying to take a busload of 33 children across the border to the Dominican Republic without authorization.
They at first presented the children as quake orphans but it quickly emerged that many of the children still had parents alive.
Parents of the children told reporters they had willingly handed their children over, after being told they would be taken to a school in the Dominican Republic.
The missionaries said they only wanted to help, but the case emerged after child protection agencies and humanitarian groups warned that Haiti's post-quake chaos was fertile ground for human traffickers and those wanting to exploit children.
