World News
Forty seven killed and more than fifty taken in a raid on the hills above Port-au-Prince
By Staff Writer | 26 August 2026
The United Nations says 22 of the dead were shot in a church compound where they had taken shelter. Five were children. It is thought to be one of the largest mass abductions in Haiti in years.
Armed men entered Kenscoff, a farming town in the hills above Port-au-Prince, late on Sunday. They set houses alight, attacked residents and left with more than fifty people. The United Nations put the dead at 47 in a statement issued on Tuesday, five of them children, and said 22 of the victims were reportedly shot in a church compound where they had gone for shelter.
The mayor of Kenscoff said 25 houses were burned and that two municipal employees were killed, one of them a relative serving on his own security detail.
The atrocity of this crime reminds us that we have to continue working stronger every day to bring peace to the community
Jean Massillon, Mayor of Kenscoff
The hostages are being used to hold the police off
The abduction is the part that changes what the police can do next. A man in a video circulated after the attack, giving a name associated with one of the country's better known armed groups, threatened to kill the hostages if any of his men were harmed during an operation to retake the town. That places the security forces in a position where doing nothing reads as an abandonment of the hostages, while acting risks the hostages being killed and the blame falling on the police.
The Secretary General of the United Nations condemned the attack and repeated his call for those responsible to be held to account, including through the specialised judicial units set up recently with international support to investigate mass crimes.
The relentless gang attacks on communities and the loss of lives underscore the alarming security conditions in Haiti
Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the United Nations
Why Kenscoff
Kenscoff sits on the high ground behind the capital. Holding it gives a group the approaches to the wealthier district below and the alternative roads that connect Port-au-Prince to the south of the country. A researcher at a conflict data organisation, quoted on the ground that access to those routes is the objective, recorded that security operations had cut violence in Kenscoff by 66 per cent between January and August before Sunday night undid the count.
The first major attack on the town came in January 2025 and there have been intermittent attacks in the surrounding mountains since. Sunday's was the largest.
An analyst at an organisation monitoring organised crime described the raid as a test for the government, the police and the international mission at the same time, and suggested one aim may be to force limited forces to spread further, so that ground is given up somewhere else.
The wider count, and the timing
One further number needs separating out. The two records read for this report both use the figure 22, and they use it for different things: one gives 22 of the dead as shot in the church compound, the other gives 22 people wounded. Neither reconciles the two and neither is treated here as the other.
Figures published by the United Nations record that criminal groups in Haiti have killed more than 16,000 people since the start of 2022, alongside 6.4 million people needing assistance and close to 1.5 million displaced inside the country. Those are cumulative figures across a four year period and are not figures for this attack.
The country is due to hold a general election on 13 December, the first in more than a decade. An attack of this size on a town that had been treated as an example of security improving carries an obvious message about who controls what, and it arrives while the electoral timetable is being set.
Nothing in the record read for this report identifies the hostages, states their condition or says what the group has asked for. The mayor said he remains hopeful that the authorities will keep working to clear the town.