Haiti Militiaman Ordered to Pay £10m for Rapes

One of Haiti's most notorious paramilitary leaders has been ordered to pay $19m (£10m) in damages to three women who were gang-raped by members of his militia.

Emmanuel "Toto" Constant, 49, was the leader of Fraph, one of Haiti's most ruthless rightwing paramilitary units, which pursued supporters of the deposed president Jean-Bertrand Aristide during the so-called reign of terror in the early 1990s. He escaped to the US in 1994 when Mr Aristide returned to power and avoided deportation the next year because, he has claimed on American television, he had been working for the CIA.

Three victims of Fraph brought a civil action last year against Constant, who has been working as an estate agent in the New York area. One woman gave evidence that her husband, a prominent Aristide supporter, had been "disappeared" in 1992. After she protested in public, she was gang-raped in front of her children.

This week, US district judge Sidney Stein ruled that the three women were each entitled to $1.5m in compensatory damages and $5m in punitive damages.

In his written judgment, the judge said Constant "founded and oversaw an organisation that was dedicated principally towards terrorising and torturing political opponents of the military regime".

Constant is in jail on Long Island awaiting trial on unrelated charges. He told CBS's 60 Minutes in 1995: "If I am guilty of those crimes ... the CIA is also guilty."