But the country’s Justice Minister Paul Denis insisted they should be brought before Haitian courts, instead of being returned to the United States.

“It is Haitian law that has been violated,” Justice Minister Paul Denis told AFP. “It is up to the Haitian authorities to hear and judge the case. I don’t see any reason why they should be tried in the United States.”

More than three weeks after the 7.0-magnitude earthquake, Bellerive said his tiny Caribbean nation had been ravaged by “a disaster on a planetary scale” and detailed the tragic toll suffered by his people.

“There are more than 200,000 people who have been clearly identified as people who are dead,” he said in an interview with AFP, adding that another 300,000 injured had been treated, 250,000 homes had been destroyed and 30,000 businesses lost.

The move underlined the impotence of the Haitian government in the wake of the 7.0-magnitude January 12 quake that killed an estimated 170,000 people and left many official buildings, including the presidential palace, in ruins.

“The electoral council has decided to postpone the legislative elections of February 28 and March 3, 2010, to a later unspecified date,” the authorities announced on Tuesday, giving no further details.

The Kavoshgar 3 (Explorer) rocket was carrying an “experimental capsule”, state-owned Al-Alam television reported.

State television’s website said it was carrying “live animals” — a rat, turtles and worms, the first such experiment by Iran in space technology.

The shift will be unveiled Monday when Obama presents his 2011 budget blueprint to Congress, according to an external White House advisor.

“Constellation is dead,” the advisor told AFP on Friday, referring to a program that envisioned using Earth’s nearest neighbor as a base for manned expeditions to Mars.

Justice officials said the 10 Americans behind the alleged abductions might have to be tried in the United States because of post-quake chaos which also led the government on Tuesday to delay legislative elections indefinitely.

“The parents now are coming to the village to reclaim their children,” said Heather Paul, the CEO of SOS Children’s Villages USA, the aid group now caring for the children.

Amid growing concern over the safety of hundreds of thousands of vulnerable women and children left destitute after the January 12 quake, the case could also go to trial in the US courts.

Mazar Fortil, interim prosecutor for the main Port-au-Prince court, told AFP the group may also face a lesser charge of criminal conspiracy.

Flights that have carried more than 500 people with spinal injuries, burns and other wounds ended Wednesday after the governor of Florida asked the government to share the financial burden on his state’s hospitals.

“Apparently, some states were unwilling to accept the entry of Haitian patients for follow-on critical care,” US Transportation Command spokesman Captain Kevin Aandahl told AFP.

Since the January 12 catastrophe killed up to 200,000 people and left around 1 million homeless in the nation of 9 million, authorities and aid workers have cleared tens of thousands of bodies from the rubble, provided water supplies for makeshift refugee camps and developed a system of food distribution.

Some police are back in the streets, schools in unaffected areas will open on Monday, communications are working and some businesses have reopened their doors.

A vast foreign aid effort is struggling to meet survivors’ needs 17 days after the disaster, which killed around 170,000 people and left one million homeless and short of medicine, food and water.

Several medical teams reported increased cases of diarrhea in the last few days in Haiti, Paul Garwood, a spokesman for the UN World Health Organization, said in Geneva.