Kidnappings in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince, increased between July and September compared with the previous quarter, with children making up 10 per cent of the victims, the United Nations Integrated Office in Haiti (BINUH) said on Wednesday in its quarterly report on the human rights situation in the country.

The report paints a grim picture of three months in which gangs and security forces were almost solely responsible for killing 1,167 people and injuring 459 across Haiti. Self-defence groups and unorganised members of the public accounted for 5 per cent of the total, the office said.

Sexual violence and police killings documented

The office documented at least 344 victims of sexual violence carried out by gangs during the quarter. It also recorded a sharp rise in extrajudicial executions and attempted extrajudicial executions by police officers, with 44 documented cases, up from 14 in the previous quarter.

In its report, BINUH recommended that the Haitian government open investigations into mass crimes, sexual violence and financial crimes, and ensure that operations against gangs are conducted in full compliance with international human rights law.

Security campaign under way

The report comes as Haitian authorities press on with an intensified security campaign alongside newly deployed Salvadoran troops, as the government tries to restore stability ahead of delayed elections.

The scale of the quarter's violence had already been set out to the UN Security Council in October, when the UN special representative for Haiti, Carlos Ruiz Massieu, said more than 1,000 people had been killed between July and September, including more than 650 identified as gang members, and that there had been more than 100 kidnapping victims. He also reported that renewed insecurity had displaced more than 17,000 people in three months, taking the total number of internally displaced people to nearly 1.5 million, including more than 740,000 children.