Haiti Kidnap Gang Seeks $17 Million Ransom for Abducted American Missionaries

Among the missionaries are five children, Mr. Quitel said, one an 8-month baby and the others 3, 6, 14 and 15 years old.

President Biden has been briefed, White House press secretary

Jen Psaki

said Monday, and the FBI will help Haitian officials investigate the kidnapping and try to negotiate a release.

“The FBI is part of a coordinated U.S. government effort to get the U.S. citizens involved to safety,” she said.

Mr. Quitel said negotiations could take weeks.

“We are trying to get them released without paying any ransom,” said Mr. Quitel. “This is the first course of action. Let’s be honest: When we give them that money, that money is going to be used for more guns and more munitions.”

He said Haiti’s authorities are seeking an outcome similar to what followed the abduction in early April of a group of Catholic priests and nuns by the same gang. The five priests, two nuns and three of their relatives were released at the end of the month. Ransom was paid for just two of the priests, Mr. Quitel said.

“That would be the best outcome,” he said.

Mr. Quitel said the missionaries, members of Ohio-based Christian Aid Ministries, are held in a safe house right outside Croix-des-Bouquets, the suburb of Port-au-Prince controlled by 400 Mawazo and near where they were kidnapped by heavily armed men around midday on Saturday.

Kidnappings in the impoverished country, including targeting foreigners, have jumped in recent months amid the political chaos after the July assassination of President

Jovenel Moïse.

Gangs control an increasing swath of the chronically unstable country.

Port-au-Prince came to a standstill on Monday after a national transportation union launched a strike supported by everyone from bank employees to human-rights organizations to protest the surge of kidnappings and lack of security.

Haitians in the city said schools, banks, restaurants and supermarkets were closed and nearby roads blocked by union members and ordinary citizens angry at the violence.

Changeux Mehu, the leader of the transportation union, said the strike could continue on Tuesday to pressure Prime Minister

Ariel Henry’s

government to improve security.

“If the prime minister can’t fulfill our demands, we will call on him to resign,” said Mr. Mehu. “We want the end of insecurity and the end of the kidnappings.”

The gang, 400 Mawozo, has increasingly turned to kidnapping for ransom in recent months, according to Haitian officials. Earlier this year, it kidnapped five priests and two nuns, including French nationals, who were held for three weeks before being released. It is unknown if ransom was paid.

Mawozo means “from the countryside” in Haitian Creole, reflecting the gang’s roots in the eastern district of Croix-des-Bouquets, where they began their activities by stealing cattle before moving into car theft and, more recently, kidnappings for ransom, according to Gédéon Jean of the Center for Analysis and Research in Human Rights, a Port-au-Prince-based organization that tracks kidnappings in Haiti.

The Christian charity, which was founded by members of the Amish and Mennonite sects, said in a statement on Monday that Haitian and U.S. officials were aware of the situation and working to resolve it. “We continue to monitor the situation closely and are in earnest prayer,” it said.

At the group’s headquarters in Berlin, Ohio, in a picturesque region of farms and Amish shops catering to tourists, the doors to the lobby were locked Monday and a sign said that it was closed as a result of the kidnapping and asking for prayers.

Wanda Cross, a 24-year-old Mennonite who lives near Minerva, Ohio, delivered donated clothes to the Christian Aid Ministries’ headquarters Monday.

Ms. Cross, who was born in Haiti and adopted by a Mennonite family in the U.S., said she was shocked to learn of the kidnappings, and that she knew one couple from Oregon.

“It’s very, very sad,” she said. “It makes me want to just go there and talk to these gangs.”

Ms. Cross said she visited her home country in April during what she described as a lull in the unrest there to see her birth mother and to visit a school. Two days after she returned to the U.S. in April, she said she learned of kidnappings at the time in the same areas in Haiti that she had visited.

Although Christian Aid Ministries is based in Berlin, most of the people on board the bus were from other Mennonite communities around the country, according to leaders in the local Amish and Mennonite community. One is believed to be from southern Ontario, Canada, which has a large Mennonite community.

All of the kidnap victims are Mennonites and not Amish, said Marcus Yoder, executive director of the Amish & Mennonite Heritage Center in Berlin.

Both Mennonites and Amish hold many beliefs in common, such as adult baptism, simplicity and following the teachings of Jesus, but the Mennonites drive cars and have electricity in their homes, unlike the Amish, who typically don’t.

Christian Aid Ministries was started in 1981 as an informal charity, shipping Christmas bundles and other items to Christians in Eastern Europe, and later created a formal organization called Christian Aid to Romania, focused on sending items to Romanian orphanages, according to Steve Nolt, senior scholar and professor of history at the Young Center at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa.

In early 1988, Christian Aid to Romania started sending donations to Nicaragua and Haiti, building on Amish-Mennonite mission contacts in those two countries, he said, and later to Liberia. The organization’s name then changed from Christian Aid to Romania to Christian Aid Ministries.

Haiti is one of about a dozen countries where Christian Aid Ministries has expatriate staff on the ground year round with local partners, said Dr. Nolt. He said there are several Mennonite organizations doing work in Haiti, but they tend to work independently, coordinating with local officials, rather than other Mennonite organizations.

—Sabrina Siddiqui in Washington, D.C., contributed to this article.

Write to Kris Maher at kris.maher@wsj.com, Juan Montes at juan.montes@wsj.com and Clare Ansberry at clare.ansberry@wsj.com