PORT-AU-PRINCE – PORT-AU-The attack was brazen, streamed live on the internet: Men carrying big guns walked into a Holy Thursday church service, grabbed the pastor and three parishioners and led them away in full view of cameras.
For Haitians, it was a fearsome emblem of a wave of kidnappings and deaths that has victimized even impoverished people already already stung by years of violence in the streets.
One of the church abductees, Steven Jérôme, spent the first night in the hands of his captors sitting on a chair afraid to close his eyes.
Meanwhile, parishioners and and relatives of the victims like Jérôme's sister, Suze, scrambled to gather money to free them. “People gave 10 gourdes, 15 gourdes, whatever they had,” she told The