- Title: HAITI: Canadian peacekeeper killed in Haiti is honoured.
- Date: 22nd December 2005
- Summary: (SOUNDBITE) (French) HAITI PRIME MINISTER GERARD LATORTUE, SAYING: "We Haitians count so much on those who come from around the world to help us in the search for stability and peace in Haiti. We are ready for the day when that stability and that peace has arrived to celebrate your participation to this common goal."
- Embargoed: 6th January 2006 12:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Haiti
- Country: Haiti
- Topics: International Relations,Defence / Military
- Reuters ID: LVACNALW8OBNJOP2KT94RK01VKPQ
- Story Text: A ceremony was held Wednesday (December 21) to honour a Canadian police officer with the U.N. peacekeeping force shot and killed in Haiti on Tuesday. Officer Mark Bourque was shot on National Route 1 not far from Cite Soleil, a large slum in the capital Port-au-Prince. He was one of 25 police officers who went to Haiti in October as part of the Canadian Special Elections Contingent. Bourque was driving his colleague to the airport when the gunmen shot at his vehicle and UN officials believe that it was an attempted kidnapping and the criminals were probably unaware that the vehicle contained two UN officers.
The peacekeepers, now numbering nearly 9,000 soldiers and police, were sent to the troubled Caribbean nation to restore security after the bloody rebellion that pushed President Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office in February 2004.
Including the Canadian police officer, nine U.N. peacekeepers have died since the deployment of the U.N. mission, four of them in accidents, according to U.N.officials in Haiti. Thirty others have been wounded. Three Chilean soldiers were ambushed and shot in the northern town of Plaisance on Friday (December 16). - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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