Former Haitian sports minister Evans Lescouflair accused of raping children

A former sports minister of Haiti has been accused of repeatedly raping an 11-year-old pupil while a teacher in the 1980s and is facing a civil lawsuit brought by several other alleged victims who claim he sexually abused them.

Complaints against Evans Lescouflair, who served in several posts at Haiti’s Ministry of Youth, Sports and Civic Action between 2008 and 2011 and remains influential in Haitian football as president of youth side Club Sportif Saint-Louis, were sent to the commissaire of Port-au-Prince governorate on Thursday by lawyers working on behalf of Claude-Alix Bertrand and several other alleged victims. It is understood that they contain accusations that one of Lescouflair’s alleged victims killed themselves in 2008.

“It’s a criminal complaint about the repeated rape of minors under 15 years old,” the lawyer Franck Vanéus told the Guardian. “The sentence for this crime is life imprisonment.”

Bertrand – the Haitian ambassador to Unesco and captain of Haiti’s national polo team – told the Guardian that he was abused by Lescouflair when he was an 11-year-old student at Saint-Louis de Gonzague at the end of the 1980s.

“He touched my intimate parts in a way that no one did before,” said Bertrand. “It was so uncomfortable. I didn’t understand anything, I was just a child. I asked him why he was doing it. He kept doing it and asked me: ‘You don’t like it?’

“After that day, I tried to avoid his look. But he kept me a second time, a third time. Each time he kept me apart after a class, things were going further until the day he raped me. He penetrated me. I cried, begging him to stop but nothing changed. It lasted for two years. It happened in an office far away from the classroom.”

Bertrand says that he