Associated Press
TITANYEN, Haiti — Haiti issued wildly conflicting death tolls for the Jan. 12 earthquake on Wednesday, adding to confusion about how many people actually died — and to suspicion that nobody really knows.
A day after Communications Minister Marie-Laurence Jocelyn Lassegue raised the official death toll to 230,000, her office put out a statement quoting President Rene Preval as saying 270,000 bodies had been hastily buried by the government following the earthquake.
A press officer withdrew the statement, saying there was an error, but re-issued it within minutes. Later Wednesday, the ministry said that due to a typo, the number should have read 170,000.
Even that didn’t clear things up. In the late afternoon, Preval and Lassegue appeared together at the government’s temporary headquarters.
Preval, speaking English, told journalists that the number was 170,000, apparently referring to the number of bodies contained in mass graves.
Lassegue interrupted him in French, giving a number lower than she had given the previous day: “No, no, the official number is 210,000.”
Preval dismissed her.
“Oh, she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” he said, again in English.
A third of Haiti’s 9 million people were crowded into the capital when the quake struck just to the southwest a few minutes before 5 p.m. Many were preparing to leave their offices or schools. Some 250,000 houses and 30,000 commercial buildings collapsed, according to government estimates, many crushing people inside.
