Correspondents in Port-au-Prince face danger as they play a vital role in chronicling city’s state of siege

Each day, Makenson Rémy wakes in the hush of the night to tell the story of his shattered home town, Port-au-Prince. Each day, he fears he might die. “I am very worried for the city. I am worried for my family. I am worried for myself too, because at any moment I could go out and never come back,” said the Haitian journalist who is responsible for the crack-of-dawn radio broadcasts that help the capital’s jittery residents stay alive.

Rémy uses a motorbike to move around the city, which a gang rebellion six weeks ago has almost entirely cut off from the outside world, gathering information on where is and isn’t safe to tread. As he slaloms through barricaded streets under the cover of darkness, he has witnessed spine-chilling scenes.

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Delivering a baby was already risky, but an unprecedented surge in gang violence has forced clinics and hospitals to close

The worst fears of midwives at Heartline Haiti were realised last week. As they prepared the maternity clinic for patients that evening, armed men laid siege to their neighbourhood in eastern Port-au-Prince, spraying bullets at police and rival gangs, setting cars on fire and ransacking houses.

“All of our staff were huddled in an interior hallway hearing the noises outside the gates and walls, afraid they may be next,” says Tara Livesay, the NGO’s executive director. “A gang member was shot dead outside, just two doors over.”

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Human rights expert voices alarm, saying country is fast moving towards becoming ‘like Somalia in the worst of its times’

• Haiti: what caused the gang violence?

The UN’s top expert on human rights in Haiti has warned the Caribbean country is rapidly moving towards becoming “like Somalia in the worst of its times” after a criminal uprising which has displaced tens of thousands of people and largely cut its capital city off from the world.

Just over a month after the gang rebellion began, William O’Neill – an American human rights lawyer who has been travelling to Haiti for more than 30 years – voiced alarm over the rapidly deteriorating situation in Port-au-Prince.

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Port-au-prince, the capital, has plunged into chaos, and gangs have shifted their offensive to places once considered safe

As gang fighters and police battled outside his home near Haiti’s beleaguered capital late last month, Nielsen Daily Fierrier hurled himself to the ground.

“From six in the morning until six in the evening, the gunfire hardly stopped,” said the 25-year-old electrician from Pétion-Ville, a middle-class suburb in the hills south of Port-au-Prince.

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Killings underscore how outnumbered police are in Haiti after months of attacks and kidnappings by gangs

Two men in Haiti were hacked to death by a mob who thought they were buying weapons for gangs, police said Saturday.

Police confirmed the crowd snatched the men from police custody after they were found with about $20,000 (£16,000) and the equivalent of about $43,000 in Haitian cash in their car, along with two pistols and a box of ammunition.

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Deal to send hundreds of officers to Caribbean country amid spiraling gang violence is facing intense public and legal scrutiny

Haiti’s raging gang insurrection has prompted growing concern in Kenya over plans to deploy hundreds of paramilitary police officers from the East African country on a UN-backed multinational mission to counter the violence.

“If they come back in body bags, what will [Kenyan President William Ruto] tell the nation?” said Ekuru Aukot, leader of the opposition Thirdway Alliance, who last year filed a legal challenge against the deployment.

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State department organizes evacuation after nearly 1,600 US citizens ask for help amid reports of continuing violence in capital

The United States has said it was starting to evacuate its citizens out of Haiti by helicopter, amid reports of fresh fighting in the Caribbean country’s gang-dominated capital, with particularly fierce gunfire in some of the city’s wealthiest enclaves.

A state department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, told reporters on Wednesday that government-chartered aircraft were in the process of beginning to ferry evacuees from Port-au-Prince to the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti.

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Gunmen looted homes in Laboule and Thomassin, forcing residents to flee previously peaceful neighborhoods

• Haiti: what caused the gang violence and will it end now the PM has quit?

Gunmen have assaulted two upscale neighborhoods in Haiti ’s capital in an attack that left at least a dozen people dead in surrounding areas and suggested that a gang insurrection that prompted the prime minister to resign is far from over.

Assailants looted homes in the communities of Laboule and Thomassin before sunrise on Monday, forcing residents to flee as some called radio stations pleading for police. Both neighborhoods had previously remained largely peaceful despite a surge in gang attacks across Port-au-Prince that began on 29 February.

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More than 30 Americans arrive in Miami from Cap-Haïten as US urges citizens to leave ‘as soon as possible’ amid gang violence

A charter flight carrying dozens of US citizens fleeing spiraling gang violence in Haiti landed on Sunday in Miami, state department officials said.

More than 30 US citizens were on the government-chartered flight, officials said in a statement. It arrived in Miami ’s international airport after the US embassy in Port-au-Prince earlier this month urged US citizens to leave “as soon as possible” as chaos grips Haiti .

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