Rebels will surrender after conviction for assassinations

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Two rebel leaders who helped oust President Jean-Bertrand Aristide promised Wednesday to surrender to face Haitian justice for earlier murder convictions.

Louis-Jodel Chamblain and Jean-Pierre Baptiste will turn themselves in to police on Thursday, Chamblain and rebel leader Winter Etienne announced.

"Chamblain is not scared of this affair. He knows he's innocent. He trusts this country's justice system now" that Aristide has been ousted, Etienne told reporters.

Chamblain has denied he was pressured to surrender. "If I could take up arms to fight Aristide's dictatorship then I have to have the courage to do this," Chamblain told The Associated Press.

Chamblain was convicted in absentia and sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1993 murder of Aristide financier Antoine Izmery, who was dragged from church and shot to death.

Both Chamblain and Baptiste were convicted and given life imprisonment for a 1994 massacre of more than a dozen Aristide supporters in the northern town of Gonaives, where Haiti's latest rebellion erupted Feb. 5.

Chamblain also allegedly ran death squads in the last years of Jean-Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier's dictatorship in the late 1980s. A former army sergeant, he is notorious for being a co-leader of the paramilitary Front for the Advancement of Progress of the Haitian People, which is blamed for deaths of some 3,000 civilians under a 1991 to 1994 coup regime.

Meanwhile, the Bahamas withdrew its diplomats from Haiti, following the shooting and robbery of its ambassador's wife and a threatening telephone call to the wife of a second diplomat, a Bahamian government spokesman told The Associated Press on Wednesday.

The Bahamas is the only Caribbean country with an embassy in Haiti. Foreign Affairs Minister Fred Mitchell told the Bahamian Parliament on Wednesday that the government did not believe the shooting was politically motivated.

But a Caribbean diplomat, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he understood the Bahamas was investigating whether the two incidents were related and connected to the bad relations between Haiti's U.S.-backed interim government and the 15-nation Caribbean Community that has refused to recognize it.

Francoise Newry, wife of Ambassador Eugene Newry, was shot and robbed of her handbag at a market near the downtown presidential palace on Saturday. That night, Michelle Williams, wife of the embassy's second secretary, received a threatening telephone call, he said.

Also Wednesday, police reported that a stampede at a police academy recruiting drive killed one person and injured 23 others in Haiti, officials said Wednesday.

Police fired tear gas and beat back applicants with batons as thousands of job hunters rushed the academy on Tuesday, crashing through the gates and past French guards. U.S. Marines arrived to help control the crowd by blocking the academy entrance with Humvees.

Most of the impoverished Caribbean country's 8 million people are without jobs and live on less than $1 a day.