PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – An unidentified man was shot dead Friday while students staged another demonstration in a week of raucous street protests in the capital’s downtown, authorities said.
Frantz Lerebours, spokesman for Haiti’s police force, said the young man was killed in an area where students have been protesting over a prison guard’s alleged fatal shooting of a 24-year-old graduate student last Saturday.
The man shot Friday appeared to be in his early 20s and was taken a few blocks to the emergency room at General Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Judge Gabriel Ambroise said the victim wasn’t carrying any identification.
Protesters accused troops from the United Nations peacekeeping mission of possibly being responsible for the death. U.N. officials denied that.
One demonstrator, Julien Marc Elie, said he saw U.N. troops fire their weapons in the direction of protesters.
“I saw for myself that the U.N. shot at the crowd,” said Elie, 25.
A spokeswoman for the U.N. peacekeeping mission, Yasmina Bouziane, disputed that the troops at the protest fired their weapons.
“Minustah didn’t fire at all,” she said, referring to the force by its French acronym.
Protesters responded to the shooting by burning a van parked outside the university and setting fire to barricades of tires. They also threw rocks at U.N. peacekeepers and riot police patrolling the area.
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