PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) — Haitian National Police say they have recovered a hijacked cargo ship loaded with rice following a gang shootout that lasted more than five hours.
Two police officers were injured and an unknown number of gang members were killed in Saturday’s shooting off the capital Port-au-Prince, authorities said in a statement.
It was a rare victory for an underfunded police department that has struggled to quell gang violence after a series of attacks that began Feb. 29.
Police said in a statement on Sunday that those responsible for the hijacking were members of two gangs, named the 5 Seconds and the Taliban gang. According to them, armed men seized the transport ship Magalie on Thursday as it left the port of Varreux.
Radio Télé Métronome reported that the gangs kidnapped everyone on board the ship and stole some 10,000 bags of rice out of the 60,000 bags it was carrying.
The ship was heading toward the northern coastal town of Cap-Haïtien.
Also on Sunday, online news site Radio graphy reported that the Taliban gang used a front loader to demolish a police station in the Port-au-Prince suburb of Canaan, where at least four police officers were killed during a recent attack. The station was no longer operational.
The most recent shootout between police and gangs comes more than a month after gunmen began targeting key government infrastructure. They burned several police stations, opened fire on the main international airport which remains closed and stormed Haiti’s two largest prisons, freeing more than 4,000 inmates.
The continuing violence forced Prime Minister Ariel Henry to announce that he would resign once a presidential transitional council was formed.
Henry was in Kenya to push for the deployment of a police force from the U.N.-backed East African country when the attacks began and remains excluded from Haiti.
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