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US American missionaries, accused of illegally trying to take children out of Haiti, pray before hearing the verdict from Haitian Deputy Prosecutor Jean Ferge Joseph of the Judicial Police office in Port-au-Prince - Source: Reuters -
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A court in Haiti freed a US missionary jailed for weeks on
charges of kidnapping children in the chaos that followed the
country's devastating January 12 earthquake, witnesses said.
Charisa Coulter was due to fly out of Haiti for the United States.
Haitian authorities had arrested 10 missionaries in January but
eight were released in February and only the group's leader, Laura
Silsby, remains in jail.
Asked how she felt on her release, Coulter said: "Bittersweet. I am
glad to go back home but the experience has been very
difficult."
She then climbed into a US embassy car and left the central police
station.
The case threw a spotlight on fears that child traffickers could
prey on vulnerable children after the quake and also on the merits
of rapid international adoptions for earthquake orphans, a practice
the government later banned.
Critics say the case has diverted attention from the hardships
faced by more than one million Haitians displaced by the quake,
including thousands of orphaned children.
Silsby, Coulter and eight other Americans, most of whom are members
of a Baptist church in Idaho, were arrested on January 29 on
charges they tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country
without proper documents.
All have protested their innocence and a judge found no evidence of
criminal intent by the eight who were released earlier.
Silsby went to court but was due to return to jail as an
investigating judge looks into a new charge that she was trying to
organize travel from Haiti for others without proper papers, a
lesser crime under Haitian law.
A Haitian judge on Friday signed an order to free Coulter, but
delayed her release until Monday because court officials could not
find a stamp used to validate the release document.
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