'Over 3,000 people killed in Haiti violence so far this year'

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GENEVA - More than 3,000 people have died amid escalating gang violence in Haiti since the beginning of the year, the United Nations said Friday.

Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere with swathes of the country under the control of rival armed gangs who carry out murders, rapes and kidnappings.

"So far this year, from January 1 to June 30, at least 3,141 people were killed across Haiti," Ravina Shamdasani, spokeswoman for the UN rights office, told reporters in Geneva.

While much of the violence had long been concentrated in Port-au-Prince, the rights office highlighted the deadly impact as the gangs extend their reach far beyond the coastal capital.

In a fresh report drafted along with the UN office in Haiti (BINUH), it found that sharply increasing violence outside of the capital had claimed more than 1,000 lives and forced hundreds of thousands to flee in the past nine months.

"Caught in the middle of this unending horror story are the Haitian people, who are at the mercy of horrific violence by gangs and exposed to human rights violations from the security forces and abuses by the so-called ‘self-defence’ groups," UN rights chief Volker Turk said in a statement.

Between October last year and the end end of June, "at least 1,018 people were killed, 213 others injured and 620 abducted in Artibonite and Centre, as well as in Ganthier and Fonds Parisien, west of the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area", the report found.

Over the same period, the total number of killings across Haiti stood at 4,864, including the 3,141 since January, the rights office said.

The report cautioned that the "expansion of gang territorial control poses a major risk of spreading violence and increasing transnational trafficking in arms and people, which could lead to significant destabilisation for countries in the Caribbean subregion".

"To prevent a rapid destabilisation of the subregion, the international community must strengthen its support to the Haitian authorities, who bear the primary responsibility for protecting the rights of their population, as well as to international and national organisations that provide assistance to vulnerable groups," it said.