More than 6,000 people in Haiti are leaving their homes after a gang attack killed dozens of people

SAINT-MARC, Haiti (AP) — Nearly 6,300 people have fled their homes in the aftermath of an attack in central Haiti by heavily armed gang members that killed at least 70 people, the U.N. migration agency said.

Nearly 90% of displaced people are staying with relatives in host families, while 12% have found shelter in other locations, including a school, the International Organization for Migration said in a report last week.

The attack in Pont-Sondé took place early on Thursday morning and many left in the middle of the night.

Gang members “came in shooting and broke into the houses to steal and burn. I just had time to grab my kids and run in the dark,” said 60-year-old Sonise Mirano on Sunday, who was camping with hundreds of people in a park in the nearby coastal town of Saint-Marc.

Bodies were strewn in the streets of Pont-Sondé after the attack in the Artibonite region, many of them killed by a shot to the head, Bertide Harace, spokeswoman for the Commission for Dialogue, Reconciliation and Awareness to Save the Artibonite, said to Magik 9 radio station on Friday.

Initial estimates put the number of dead at 20 people, but activists and government officials discovered more bodies as they reached parts of the city. The victims included a young mother, her newborn baby and a midwife, Herace said.

Prime Minister Garry Conille promised on Friday in Saint-Marc that the perpetrators will face the full force of the law.

“It is necessary to arrest them, bring them to justice and put them in jail. They need to pay for what they did, and the victims need to get restitution,” he said.

The U.N. Human Rights Commissioner’s Office said in a statement that it was “shocked by Thursday’s mob attacks.”

The European Union also condemned the violence in a statement on Friday, which it said marked “a new escalation of the extreme violence inflicted on the Haitian people by these criminal groups.”

The Haitian government sent an elite police unit in the capital Port-au-Prince to Pont-Sondé after the attack and sent medical supplies to help the area’s lonely and overwhelmed hospital.

Police will remain in the area as long as necessary to ensure safety, Conille said, adding that he did not know whether it would last a day or a month. He also appealed to the public and said: “The police cannot do it alone.”

Gang violence in Artibonite, which produces much of Haiti’s food, has increased in recent years. Since that revival, Thursday’s attack is one of the biggest massacres.

Similar events have occurred in the capital Port-au-Prince, 80% of which is controlled by gangs, and are usually linked to gang warfare, where gang members attack civilians in areas controlled by rivals. Many neighborhoods are not safe and those affected by the violence cannot return home, even if their homes have not been destroyed.

More than 700,000 people — more than half of whom are children — are now internally displaced in Haiti, the International Organization for Migration said in an Oct. 2 statement. That was an increase of 22% since June.

Port-au-Prince is home to a quarter of the country’s displaced people, who often live in overcrowded locations and have little or no access to basic services, the agency said.

Those forced to flee their homes are mostly sheltered by families, who have reported significant problems, including food shortages, overwhelmed health care facilities and a lack of essential supplies in local markets, the agency said.

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Hughes reported from Rio de Janeiro.