Retribution swift and brutal for Haiti's looters

[FarCenter]

A police officer disperses people that were surprised taking goods from quake-damaged stores in downtown Port-au-Prince Photograph: Ramon Espinosa/AP

Sixteen hours after he was thrown onto a Port-au-Prince rubbish dump and set alight, the body of the lynched thief was still smouldering – a macabre glimpse of the sporadic violence that is flaring up in this desperate city.

With water, food and shelter in short supply for hundreds of thousands of earthquake survivors, localised flashpoints of looting and vigilante action to punish the perpetrators have arisen across the city. Haitian police were also reported to have shot dead at least one looter.

Incongruously, the thief's last resting place lay between two institutions of peace and culture. On one side of the street in which he lay was a church, on the other an art gallery, the Musart Beau Decor.

The body had been burned to a cinder but you could see the remnants of a tyre that had been lain on or around him as part of the living funeral pyre of rubbish that had been created for him by the lynch mob. The thief — whose identity will probably never be known other than the description offered by locals of "le voleur" — made the fatal error of trying to steal fruit juice from a nearby street vendor in Petionville, a neighbourhood of Port-au-Prince where there is a relatively active police presence. By some accounts, the man pulled out a gun and shot the vendor in the head as he was making the robbery.

Police were close at hand — their headquarters are just a few blocks away — and the thief was apprehended. What happened next is unclear. But the end result is certain: he was frogmarched by about 12 men, beaten, thrown on the street, covered with a pyre of rubbish, and burned.

<SNIP>http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jan/17/retribution-lynching-haiti-looters

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Back to "necklacing" with burning tires, apparently. A Haitian tradition.