The death toll in the major earthquake that struck Haiti has risen to 2,207, authorities said, as attacks on aid convoys have complicated efforts to bring relief to survivors. New bodies have been found in the south,” said a statement from the country’s civil protection office, adding that 344 people remain missing and 12,268 have been listed as injured. The previously reported toll was 2,189 dead.
Search-and-rescue workers are continuing to pick through the jumbled mounds of debris left by the powerful 7.2-magnitude quake, but hopes of finding survivors were fading by the hour. Haitian authorities said nearly 600,000 people were directly affected by the disaster and are in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.
But efforts to deliver food, water and medical supplies to quake victims have been complicated not just by road and bridge damage but by attacks on aid convoys by so far unidentified gangs. We have a security problem that is becoming more and more serious,” said Jerry Chandler, director of Haiti’s civil protection agency.
Since early June, a two-kilometre stretch of highway running to the southwest peninsula from Port-au-Prince has been unsafe to travel, amid persistent gang violence in a desperately poor neighbourhood of the capital.
“We’re literally facing a problem of banditry, and we’re working flat out with the police, who are sending reinforcements to the south,” Chandler said. Some of the worst destruction was in hard-to-reach rural areas, so the Haitian authorities have been using a United Nations helicopter and eight US aircraft to deliver aid.
In other news – EXPOSED: Khanyi Mbau’s boyfriend Kudzai Mushonga is a drug dealer?
Khanyi Mbau’s boyfriend Terrence Kudzai Mushonga is being investigated by the police for dealing in drugs.
Mushonga, whose South African name is Dick Lefa Nzula, and who carries a smart ID card and a driver’s licence bearing those names, was nabbed by the police in Sandton on August 28 2019, but released when he appeared in court after the case was struck off the roll for further investigation. Learn more
Source: eNCA
