Ten US Baptist missionaries have been charged with kidnapping for trying to take 33 children out of Haiti.
The Haitian lawyer who represents the 10 Americans portrayed nine of them as innocents caught up in a scheme they did not understand.
But Edwin Coq did not defend the actions of the group leader, Laura Silsby, though he continued to represent her.
“I’m going to do everything I can to get the nine out. They were naive. They had no idea what was going on and they did not know that they needed official papers to cross the border,” Mr Coq said. “But Silsby did.”
The Americans, most of them members of two Idaho churches, said they were rescuing abandoned children and orphans from a nation that Unicef says had 380,000 even before the catastrophic January 12th quake.
But at least two thirds of the children, aged two to 12, have parents who gave them away because they said the Americans promised the children a better life.
The investigating judge, who interviewed the missionaries in Port-au-Prince on Tuesday and Wednesday, found sufficient evidence to charge them for trying to take the children across the border into the Dominican Republic on January 29th without documentation, Mr Coq said.
Each was charged with one count of kidnapping, which carries a sentence of five to 15 years in prison, and one of criminal association, punishable by three to nine years.
Mr Coq said the case would be assigned a judge and a verdict could take three months. The magistrate, Mazard Fortil, left without making a statement.
Social affairs minister Jeanne Bernard Pierre, who has harshly criticised the missionaries, refused to comment. The government’s communications minister, Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue, said only that the next court date had not been set.
US ambassador Kenneth Merten arrived after 5pm outside judicial police headquarters, where the Americans are being held and where President Rene Preval and top ministers now have temporary offices because theirs were destroyed in the earthquake.
“The US justice system cannot interfere in what’s going on with these Americans right now,” he told reporters. “The Haitian justice system will do what it has to do.” US consular officials have been making regular visits to the missionaries.
On Wednesday, secretary of state Hillary Clinton called the Americans’ behaviour “unfortunate whatever the motivation”.
US State Department spokesman PJ Crowley said the US was open to discuss “other legal avenues” for the defendants, an apparent reference to the Haitian prime minister’s earlier suggestion that Haiti could consider sending the
Americans back to the US for prosecution.
Ms Silsby waved and smiled faintly to reporters but declined to answer questions as the Baptists were whisked away from the closed-court hearing back to the cells where they have been held since Saturday.
Earlier, she had expressed optimism about being released.
“We expect God’s will will be done. And we will be released. And we’re looking forward to what God is going to do,” she said before learning they would be charged.
Ms Silsby had begun planning last summer to create an orphanage for Haitian children in the Dominican Republic. When the earthquake struck she recruited other church members to help. The 10 Americans rushed to Haiti and spent a week gathering children for their project.
Most of the children came from the quake-ravaged village of Callebas, where residents said they handed over their children to the Americans because they were unable to feed or clothe them after the earthquake. They said the missionaries promised to educate the children and let relatives visit.
Their stories contradicted Silsby’s account that the children came from collapsed orphanages or were handed over by distant relatives. She had said the Americans believed they had all the paperwork needed - documents she said she obtained in the Dominican Republic - to take the children out of Haiti.
AP