Collapsed Haiti School Owner Held After School Collapses Killing 88
- November 9, 2008
The owner of the school in Haiti which collapsed killing scores of children has been arrested and charged with involuntary manslaughter.
Rescuers are continuing to search through tonnes of rubble for survivors – but at least 88 people are now known to have died.
It is thought as many as 500 children may have been inside the church-run College La Promesse, in Port-au-Prince, at the time of the disaster.
Fortin Augustin, the preacher who owns and built the school, is being held at a police station in Haiti’s capital.
Rescuers have pulled four children – aged between three and seven-years-old – alive from the rubble, said UN police spokesman Andre Leclerc.
Parents clutched pictures of their children as they watched rescue teams from around the world search through the rubble.
Riot police chased away several people who got past police barriers and were trying to excavate the site themselves.
Some 700 children were reportedly enrolled at the three-story school, but it is not known how many were in the building when it caved in on Friday.
President Rene Preval said the school had been built with hardly any structural steel or cement to hold its concrete blocks together.
Debris crushed neighbouring homes in the Nerettes community.
The disaster struck as the poorest country in the Americas struggles to recover from four tropical storms and hurricanes that killed more than 800 people and destroyed 60% of its crops in August and September.
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