Haitian police arrested the owner of a school that collapsed on top of classrooms filled with students and teachers, killing at least 88 and launching a desperate search for survivors trapped in tons of rubble.
Fortin Augustin, the preacher who owns and built College La Promesse in suburban Port-au-Prince, was arrested late on Saturday and charged with involuntary manslaughter, police spokesman Garry Desrosier said.
Augustin was being held at a police station in the Haitian capital, while a US rescue crew searched overnight for survivors of Friday’s collapse of the three-story building, which normally holds 500 students and teachers.
PHOTO: AP
In a rare moment of joy in a grim task, Haitian rescuers pulled four children alive on Saturday from the rubble and cradled them in their arms as they ran toward ambulances, UN police spokesman Andre Leclerc said.
Leclerc said he did not know the extent of the injuries to the two girls, ages three and five, and two boys, a seven-year-old and a teenager.
But he added the three-year-old had a cut on her head and seemed to be OK.
Nadia Lochard, civil protection coordinator for the western region that includes Petionville, said the death toll rose to 84 on Saturday, with 150 others injured and many more still missing.
Later, US rescuers using digital cameras on long poles to look under the rubble found six or seven bodies, but think that two of them were already included in Lochard’s death toll, said Evan Lewis, a member of the team from Fairfax County, Virginia.
In the two days of rescues, parents clutched pictures of their children as they watched rescue workers sidestep human limbs sticking out from the rubble. Riot police chased away several Haitians who found their way past police barriers and tried to excavate the site themselves.
About 500 students typically crowded into the hillside school, which had been holding a party the day of the collapse, exempting students from wearing uniforms and complicating efforts to identify their bodies, Lochard said.
Thousands of Haitians cheered and shouted directions as trucks carried medical supplies down the mountain road on Saturday.
By nightfall, hundreds stood in the shadows across a ravine behind the collapsed school watching rescuers pick through the rubble amid floodlights.
Angelique Toussaint kept vigil on a rooftop overlooking the rubble on Saturday and prayed that her 13-year-old granddaughter, Velouna, would be saved. Her three other grandchildren were found alive on Friday, and one granddaughter underwent an operation for a severely broken leg.
Dressed in her white church clothes, the 55-year-old Roman Catholic said she had attended a group prayer for missing children.
Velouna’s parents had gone home, exhausted from the oppressive heat and endless waiting as rescuers struggled to work around a hanging concrete slab that could not be safely removed.
“I think they’re doing a good job. It’s a little slow, but I’m relieved all these people are helping,” Toussaint said.
Local authorities used their bare hands to pull bleeding students from the wreckage before heavy equipment and international teams arrived late on Friday and Saturday to help, including some 38 search-and-rescue officials and four rescue dogs from Virginia.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS