Four bodies handed over to special forces on a mission to Haiti to recover Salvadoran hostages are “not our men”, El Salvador’s president has said.
Nayib Bukele said a nongovernmental organisation delivered the human remains to one of Haiti’s airports claiming they were four El Salvadoran air technicians, but that one of the corpses was a child’s and another was wearing a different country’s army uniform.
He had dispatched a military contingent, reportedly of hundreds of soldiers, on Thursday after the four men vanished after being ambushed by “heavily armed criminal groups”.
The hostages had been part of the UN-backed Gang Suppression Force (GSF), which is tasked with tackling worsening gang violence in Haiti.
The men had been travelling back to their camp in an armoured vehicle when they were attacked in an area of the Caribbean island nation controlled by armed groups called Croix-des-Bouquets. No gang has so far claimed responsibility.
Bukele previously said the Salvadoran military operation in Haiti had the sole purpose of returning the four men alive. Approximately 450 soldiers had so far been deployed, according to Haitian newspaper Le Nouvelliste.
Bukele said the bodies the mission had received included one of a man of “considerably greater height than that of our air technicians”, a person “who was wearing part of a uniform from an army that is not ours”, and that among the remains were identification cards and uniforms from other countries.
He posted pictures showing the ID card of a GSF member and a corresponding national ID card from Chad in Africa.
Bukele’s comments poured skepticism on an earlier report in the New York Times, citing people close to the Salvadoran mission, that the bodies found on the outskirts of the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, on Saturday were thought to belong to the missing men.
The newspaper reported that the bodies delivered to the military contingent had been badly burned, meaning a medical examination would be required to identify them.
It cited one unnamed source briefed on the situation as saying the ID posted by Bukele in fact belonged to a soldier who had lost it when he had been injured.
Haiti has been ravaged by gang violence for years, but the situation has worsened in the political vacuum that followed the assassination of its president in 2021.
The multinational force dispatched to quell the violence and push back the armed gangs has struggled to penetrate areas where they hold sway.
More than 5,700 people have been killed or injured by gangs or during operations against them between 1 January and 11 September this year, the UN said at the start of October.
Bukele said the four GSF members had primarily been there to “carry out medical evacuations and save lives, not to wage war”.
When they were abducted, helicopters were deployed and multiple attempts were made to reach the location, but these efforts were hampered by fighting in the area, the Salvadoran armed forces said.
