PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) – A mysterious fire swept through sections of a Haitian market hours after polls closed in national elections, leaving scrap-wood stalls and inventory in ashes.
Vendors picked through the ashes Monday looking for anything they could salvage. A lucky few found half-burnt sacks of vegetables and grain. But most could only recover blackened scraps of sheet metal roofing.
The blaze erupted late Sunday at the main market in the hillside Petionville district above Port-au-Prince where hundreds of poor vendors sell vegetables, clothes and other wares.
The cause isn’t immediately known and likely never will be due to the troubled country’s barely functional fire department.
But some Haitians feel there may have been a political motive since the fire broke out shortly after voting ended in repeatedly delayed presidential and legislative elections.