Haitian protesters clash with UN peacekeepers

Protesters in northern Haiti set fire to a police station and clashed with United Nations peacekeepers Monday as anger turned to violence in response to a cholera outbreak that has claimed almost 1,000 lives, vesti.ru reports.

Demonstrators set a police station and vehicles inside ablaze as they went on the rampage, accusing the government of leaving the population to die, witnesses said.

The Nepalese contingent that arrived in the country shortly before the outbreak in mid-October is blamed by many for being the source of the cholera epidemic, RIA Novosti said citing AFP.

A second protest on Monday reportedly involved stones being thrown at the UN peacekeeping unit in the central town of Hinche.

Less than a month after the emergence of Haiti's first cholera outbreak in half a century, the number of confirmed number of fatalities is at 917 and rising by more than 50 a day.

Most deaths have been in central and northern Haiti, with the disease not yet widespread in the capital Port-au-Prince, badly damaged in a January quake which killed 250,000 people and left 1.3 homeless.