Tools of the trade

Weapons confiscated in police operations against gangs are displayed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. At least 148 people have been killed in the Haitian capital, some of them burned alive, since two rival gangs launched an all-out turf war late last month, a human rights organisation has said.

Denouncing “a massacre of incredible cruelty”, the National Network for the Defence of Human Rights said people had been killed by bullets and knives, with some victims torched “inside their own houses” or “in the streets, with tyres”.

Most of the murdered women and girls had been raped before they were killed, it added.

The Haitian organisation said it knew of a mass grave containing at least 30 corpses that had been left in the street to rot under the blazing Caribbean sun.

The United Nations said last Friday that it had learned of the killing of at least 75 civilians in this latest upsurge of violence, including women and children.

At least 9,000 residents of the afflicted neighbourhoods have fled their homes and taken refuge with relatives or in temporary sites, such as churches and schools.

For several decades, armed gangs have been raging in the poorest neighbourhoods of Port-au-Prince, but they have drastically tightened their hold on the city and the country in recent years.

More than two weeks since the outbreak began, the Haitian government has still not commented on the violence, which has placed the capital in a state of siege, preventing any safe exit by road to the rest of the country.