PORT-AU-PRINCE - Haitian police say they have arrested the owner of a ramshackle school that collapsed and killed at least 90 people, many of whom were children.
Police spokesman Garry Desrosier said Fortin Augustin, the Protestant minister who owns and built College La Promesse on the outskirts of Port-of Prince, the Haitian capital, was arrested yesterday and charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Mr Augustin is being held at a police station in Port-au-Prince. It is not immediately clear how many counts he faces or when he is expected to stand trial.
Rescue crews from around the world continued to search for survivors of Friday's collapse of the three-storey concrete building.
Besides those killed, at least 150 people have been injured. The hillside structure also destroyed two houses as it fell.
The death toll rose on Saturday after rescue workers uncovered a room full of dead, many of them children, officials said.
Rescue workers arrived from the United States and the French Caribbean island of Martinique to help the ill-equipped and impoverished country and the UN peacekeepers posted there in their search for survivors.
Officials said 700 children were enrolled at the La Promesse school, but it was not known how many were in the building when it caved in on Friday as class was in session.
The disaster struck as the poorest country in the Americas struggled to recover from four tropical storms and hurricanes that killed more than 800 people and destroyed 60 per cent of its crops in August and September.
Rescuers have been working frantically at the school site, bringing in a crane to lift blocks of concrete. Firefighters from Virginia and rescue workers from Martinique brought sniffer dogs.
President René Préval said the church school had been built with hardly any structural steel or cement to hold its concrete blocks together. Debris crushed neighbouring residences in the Nerettes community.
Prosecutor Joseph Manes Louis said Mr Augustin stated that he had once worked on construction sites as a foreman.
"He told me he built the building all by himself. He said he didn't need an engineer because he had good knowledge of construction."
Two of Chimene Rene's children were found alive, but two sons, Stevenson Casamajor (13) and Jeff Casamajor (15) were still missing.
"We've been everywhere. We've been to the hospital, we've been everywhere looking for them," she said. "It seems there is no more hope now because it seems that nobody will come out alive from the rubble."
Crowds of screaming and crying parents searched for their children in the ruins, and roads around the school were so jammed with people that some rescuers had to be brought in by helicopter.
A rescue worker said the dead included an entire philosophy class with the exception of one girl who was alive because she had asked for permission to leave to use the bathroom just before the collapse.
"It is a tragedy, particularly when it involves children," said UN mission chief Hedi Annabi. "I share their sorrow and express my profound sympathy to the relatives of the victims."
More than 9,000 multinational troops and police make up the UN peacekeeping force sent to stabilize Haiti after its former president was driven out in a bloody rebellion in 2004. - (Reuters)