Meghan Hurley, Ottawa (The Ottawa Citizen) – Calling the situation in Haiti “chaotic” following the deadly earthquake that struck Tuesday, the commissioner for the RCMP said Thursday morning the two missing police officers are still not accounted for.
“There are a lot of reports and speculation around this crisis and the status of our two members, however, please know that efforts are still underway to locate the two missing officers,” Commissioner William Elliott said in a statement.
“We are doing everything we can to find our missing members under these exceptional circumstances and are also waiting for additional resources to assist us in our work.”
Supt. Doug Coates, acting commissioner of the United Nations’s stabilization mission in Haiti, MINUSTAH, was reported missing along with Sgt. Mark Gallagher from Halifax.
Coates may have been inside the UN headquarters in Port-au-Prince when the building crumbled due to the massive quake.
The RCMP has a team of 82 officers from across Canada stationed in Haiti. “They were doing a lot of mentoring, training and working with Haitian police because a lot of them are just out of school,” said Lee Woodyear, a spokesman with the UN’s peacekeeping department, said Wednesday. “They had done a lot of work taking on the different gangs that were wreaking some havoc.”
Elliott said Thursday the other Canadian officers who worked in Port-au-Prince are safe and have been taken to the logistics base at the airport. The police officers in remote regions continue to do their work as usual.
Three more RCMP officers have been deployed to Haiti to assess the situation and provide support to the police officers.
The RCMP is in contact with the families of all police officers deployed to Haiti on a regular basis.
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