El Salvador president says bodies found in Haiti are not those of hostages
Nayib Bukele says bodies delivered to soldiers are "not our men" amid search for Salvadorans abducted last week.
El Salvador’s president says bodies found in Haiti are not those of hostages
Nayib Bukele said the bodies handed to Salvadoran forces in Haiti were "not our men"
Four bodies turned over to special forces sent to Haiti to recover Salvadoran hostages are "not our men", El Salvador’s president has said.
Nayib Bukele said a nongovernmental organisation brought the human remains to one of Haiti’s airports, saying they were four Salvadoran air technicians, but that one of the bodies was a child’s and another was dressed in a different country’s army uniform.
He had sent a military contingent, reportedly numbering in the hundreds, on Thursday after the four men disappeared following an ambush by "heavily armed criminal groups".
The hostages had been part of the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force (GSF), which is meant to confront Haiti’s worsening gang violence.
The men were returning to their camp in an armoured vehicle when they were attacked in an area of the Caribbean island nation controlled by armed groups known as Croix-des-Bouquets. No gang has yet said it was responsible.
Bukele had earlier said the Salvadoran military operation in Haiti had only one aim: to bring the four men back alive. According to Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste, about 450 soldiers had been deployed so far.
Bukele said the bodies received by the mission included one belonging to a man of "considerably greater height than that of our air technicians", a person "who was wearing part of a uniform from an army that is not ours", and that the remains also included identification cards and uniforms from other countries.
He posted images showing the ID card of a GSF member and a matching national ID card from Chad in Africa.
Bukele’s remarks cast doubt on an earlier New York Times report, which cited people close to the Salvadoran mission and said the bodies found on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, on Saturday were believed to be those of the missing men.
The newspaper said the bodies delivered to the military contingent had been badly burned, so a medical examination would be needed to identify them.
It quoted one unnamed source briefed on the matter as saying the ID posted by Bukele actually belonged to a soldier who had lost it when he was injured.
Haiti has been devastated by gang violence for years, but the crisis has deepened in the political vacuum that followed the assassination of its president in 2021.
The multinational force sent to curb the violence and push back the armed gangs has struggled to enter areas under their control.
The UN said at the start of October that more than 5,700 people had been killed or injured by gangs or in operations against them between 1 January and 11 September this year.
Bukele said the four GSF members had mainly been there to "carry out medical evacuations and save lives, not to wage war".
When they were taken, helicopters were deployed and several attempts were made to reach the site, but those efforts were hindered by fighting in the area, the Salvadoran armed forces said.