Eight people, including Irish missionary, missing after gunmen storm Haiti orphanage

Eight people, including an Irish missionary and a three-year-old child, are still missing on Monday after gunmen stormed an orphanage in Haiti, the latest attack in an area controlled by a powerful collection of armed gangs.

Authorities scrambled to relocate dozens of children and staff from the Saint-Hélène orphanage run by Nos Petits Frères et Sœurs, an international charity with offices in Mexico and France.

The orphanage cares for more than 240 children, according to its website.

Among those kidnapped early on Sunday was Gena Heraty, an Irish missionary who has worked in Haiti for 30 years and oversaw the orphanage.

She was assaulted in 2013 when suspects broke into the orphanage and killed her colleague, according to Irish media.

Sunday’s attack is the latest high-profile kidnapping involving a foreign missionary.

In 2021, the 400 Mawozo gang kidnapped 17 missionaries, including five children, from a US-based organisation in Ganthier, east of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

The majority were held captive for 61 days.

Sunday's kidnapping occurred in Kenscoff, a community in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area.

The doors to the orphanage remained closed on Monday as Haiti’s Institute of Social Welfare and Research worked with UNICEF to identify sites where children and employees could be relocated.

No one has claimed responsibility for the kidnappings in an area controlled by a gang federation known as Viv Ansanm.

The US this year designated it as a foreign terrorist organisation.

Simon Harris, Ireland’s deputy prime minister, said in a statement that the kidnappings of Heraty and the others were "deeply worrying," and called for their immediate release.

In a past interview with the Irish Independent newspaper, Heraty recalled being threatened to death when suspects broke into the orphanage in 2013.

"They were quite aggressive. One had a hammer, one had a gun," she said. Heraty said her colleague was killed with a hammer after he rushed to help her and others.

"The last place you would expect a violent death to happen in Haiti would be in a house with special-needs people," she said. "Life is just not fair. We know that. We just have to accept it."

At least 175 people in Haiti were reported kidnapped from April to the end of June of this year, with 37% of those cases occurring in Port-au-Prince.

The United Nations said a majority of those kidnappings were blamed on the Grand Ravine and Village de Dieu gangs, which form part of the Viv Ansanm federation.

The number of people uprooted by gang violence in Haiti has more than tripled in the last year to hit a record high of at least 1 million, the UN migration agency said in January.

The International Organization for Migration (IOM) said the situation is particularly severe in the capital where "relentless gang violence" has fuelled a near-doubling of internal displacement and the collapse of healthcare and other services.

Haiti has been plagued by worsening gang violence since the 2021 assassination of former President Jovenel Moïse. Armed gangs now control most of Port-au-Prince and the arrival of a UN-backed multinational security force last June has so far had little impact.

More than 5,600 people were reported killed in Haiti last year, up 20% on 2023, according to data released by the UN Human Rights Office at the start of the year.