Haitian soccer team teens AWOL after JFK airport stopover

Most of Haiti's under-17 national soccer team

apparently deserted the squad during a stopover at Kennedy Airport hours before a planned trip yesterday to South Korea to prepare for the upcoming FIFA Under-17 World Cup.

By yesterday afternoon, five or six of the 13 missing players had returned to the airport and turned themselves in to team officials, said Felix Augustin, the Haitian consul in New York. It was unclear where the youngsters had been and why they had left the team, he said.

"All I know is that six of them have been retrieved and we're still looking for the others," he said by telephone.

Thirteen of the team's 18 players went missing from the airport between Tuesday night and yesterday morning.

"We don't know exactly where they are, but we're making calls to people [in the Haitian community] to try and get them back," Augustin said earlier in the day.

The players arrived from Haiti on Tuesday and were scheduled to leave early yesterday for Seoul.

The Port Authority, which operates the airport, said it was aware of the situation and had assigned police officers to investigate. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Embassy in Haiti, Shaila Manyam, said embassy officials were looking into the matter.

Augustin said authorities believe adults may be involved in the players' desertion and warned they could face criminal charges unless they turn over the minors, all of whom are younger than 17.

"It seems that some adults may have been involved. If so, they are going to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law," said Augustin, who declined to give further details.

Speaking to a Haitian Creole-language radio station in New York, the president of the Haitian Football Federation, Yves Jean-Bart, warned the youngsters that they were hurting their futures and threatened to involve U.S. authorities "unless these players reinstate themselves as soon as possible."

Jean-Bart gave no indication why the players would abandon the team. But Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and thousands of Haitians leave the country each year to escape miserable living conditions, violence and political instability.

A spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, Lucille Cirillo, said the agency would help investigators, but added that immigration officials would not typically become involved in such cases until the expiration of the players' tourist visas, which could take up to six months.

The Under-17s qualified for the biennial World Cup for the first time in the nation's history earlier this year.

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