Doctors examined burned remains found Saturday to determine if they were the bodies of four Salvadoran soldiers who disappeared after being deployed to Haiti on an international mission to crack down on gangs, according to four people close to the mission.
The remains were found six days after the men were ambushed while driving through a gang stronghold, said Scott Reece, a former State Department security official whose humanitarian aid organization retrieved them.
Mr. Reece’s group, Hero Client Rescue, a U.S.-funded medical evacuation service based in Haiti, said he was called to pick up the remains on Saturday afternoon.
The bodies had been badly burned and were not easily identifiable, three people familiar with the situation but not authorized to speak publicly confirmed.
But Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, denied that the bodies were those of his nation’s missing soldiers. Just days ago, he had sent hundreds of special forces members to Haiti to try to recover the men, and had threatened to finish the gangs off if the men were not returned alive.
In a social media post Saturday night responding to a New York Times article on the discovery, Mr. Bukele confirmed that a nonprofit organization had delivered human remains at the airport, saying that they belonged to the four Salvadoran air technicians.
“However, the remains correspond to a child, a man of considerably greater height than that of our air technicians, and a person who was wearing part of a uniform from an army that is not ours. Among the remains, identification cards and military uniforms from other countries were also found.”
He posted identification of a soldier from Chad.
One person briefed on the situation said the identification Mr. Bukele posted belonged to a member of the Gang Suppression Force’s Chadian contingent, who was injured on the field and lost his ID.
The four Salvadorans had been deployed as part of a helicopter unit assigned to the Gang Suppression Force, a mission authorized a year ago by the U.N. Security Council to go after Haiti’s gangs.
The Salvadoran military said the men were driving through the Croix-des-Bouquets area near Port-au-Prince in an armored S.U.V. last Sunday when they came under fire and had to flee the vehicle, which was later found burned. The men were returning from a trip to a supermarket, driving through an area that is so dangerous that it is generally off-limits to foreigners.
They have not been heard from since, and no ransom demands have been made, people close to the case said.
The local news media reported that the Salvadorans were killed and then burned by Chen Mechan and 400 Mawozo, gangs that operate in that area, on the northern outskirts of the capital.
The missing men were aviation technicians who handled transport and medical evacuations for the Gang Suppression Force.
Gangs have wreaked havoc in Haiti for several years, taking over entire neighborhoods and killing thousands of people. More than 1.5 million people have had to flee their homes.
After another international police mission failed to quell the violence, the new anti-gang force arrived in Haiti in April. It has struggled to reach its full expected deployment of 5,500. It currently has just over 2,000 troops in Haiti, from Jamaica, Chad, Mongolia, El Salvador, Sri Lanka and Guatemala.
At least four G.S.F. soldiers have been injured in the search for the Salvadorans.
The G.S.F. declined to comment.
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