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Ten Americans charged with abducting children in Haiti awaited Monday a decision on their fate, but the case took an unexpected turn as their former legal adviser was probed for sex trafficking.
Chief prosecutor Joseph Manes Louis arrived at the court in the capital Port-au-Prince without indicating whether the missionaries from the US state of Idaho would be provisionally released or remain behind bars pending trial.
Alain Lemithe, a lawyer for one of the Americans, said a decision could come as early as Monday and suggested the judge might even throw out the charges against them altogether.
But Lemithe said he was concerned their possible release could be derailed by an investigation by police in El Salvador involving their Dominican former legal adviser. "I fear that. Sincerely, I fear that," he told AFP.
That adviser, Jorge Puello, who is now back in the Dominican Republic, denied the allegations of sex trafficking and said he had anyway had no contact with the Americans prior to their arrest on January 29.
Salvadoran police say Puello bears a strong resemblance to Jorge Torres Orellana, accused by Interpol of running an international sex trafficking ring that lured women and girls from the Caribbean and Central America into prostitution with bogus offers of modeling jobs.
"They are accusing me of something that I don't even know myself," Puello told AFP. "I'm open to questions. It could happen that two people could have the same name. Whatever the case may be, I'm not afraid of anything."
Even if Puello is completely innocent, his implication in such a case is an unwelcome coincidence for the 10 Americans, who have been languishing in a Port-au-Prince jail for more than two weeks.
The group from the New Life Children's Refuge were caught trying to take a busload of 33 children they said they thought were orphans across the border into the Dominican Republican.
After it emerged that many of the children had parents, the Americans' lawyers have sought to portray the Baptists as acting selflessly to help during Haiti's catastrophe. They say the group had no criminal intent.
Some of the parents have told the judge in the case they willingly gave up their children because they were unable to care for them following the devastation wrought by the January 12 disaster.
As the nation still struggles to recover, the case threatens to overshadow relief efforts and Gervais Charles, president of the Port-au-Prince bar association, suggested it should be transferred to the United States.
"I believe that at the moment we don't have what is really necessary" to try this case, Charles said. "It's not only the (collapsed) buildings. There is the trauma."
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper flew in to give a boost to the relief work in Haiti, where efforts are under way to shelter an estimated 1.2 million homeless before the onset of seasonal rains and the hurricane season.
Harper will spend two days in Haiti meeting its leaders and taking stock of the country's needs more than a month after the January 12 disaster, which claimed in excess of 217,000 lives.
He is scheduled to meet President Rene Preval and Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive later Monday before touring the following day the devastated seaside town of Jacmel, where Canadian forces have opened an airfield to deliver aid.
Harper will also visit the flattened town of Leogane, west of the capital, and tour water purification sites, a local hospital and the rebuilding of a local school.
With the coming rainy season threatening to worsen already squalid conditions in makeshift camps across the capital, aid organizations have been seeking to distribute tarps for up to 1,500 families per day.
But a month after the 7.0 magnitude quake, UN officials said only about 50,000 families, or an estimated 272,000 people, have received emergency materials to build their own shelters.
"It's not enough," Germain Jeanscott, a 34-year-old father of two, said of the tarps. "Most families are in difficult situations."
The US military, meanwhile, said Haitian officials were expected to make an announcement in the coming days about reopening commercial flights at Port-au-Prince airport.
