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Weston Showalter, a spokesman for the religious group, read a letter from the hostages' families
Photo: AARON JOSEFCZYK / REUTERS
The kidnappers of the North American missionaries in Haiti have threatened to kill their hostages.
"If I don't get what I need, I'll kill these Americans," said the head of the infamous Gang 400 Mawozo, Wilson Joseph, in a video posted online Thursday.
The kidnappers are demanding a million dollar ransom for each of the 17 hostages.
Joseph has been wanted by the Haitian police since December 2020 for "murder, attempted murder, kidnapping, vehicle theft and hijacking of trucks".
In the video he is wearing a suit and is surrounded by several armed men.
In the background, five coffins can be seen which, according to Joseph, contain the bodies of five members of his gang who were killed by the police.
The missionaries and their families were abducted on Saturday on their way back from an orphanage outside the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince.
According to their Christian organization, there are five men, seven women and five children.
16 of them are US citizens, one is Canadian.
The US State Department has sent a small team of investigators to Haiti.
As recently as April, ten people, including two French clergy, were detained by 400 Mawozo for 20 days in the same region.
The group controls several roads in the area.
There she repeatedly hijacks vehicles and even entire buses, abducts their occupants and demands ransom.
According to human rights activists, the number of kidnappings has increased significantly in recent months.
Haiti, which is characterized by great poverty, has been struggling for years with natural disasters and political crises that have paralyzed the state and the economy.
The murder of President Jovenel Moïse in July, which has not yet been dealt with, and a major earthquake a month later in the south-west of the country, in which 2,200 people died and 130,000 houses were destroyed, further exacerbated the country's problems.
kim / AFP / Reuters