Kids in Haiti 'kidnapping' have parents

All 33 children US missionaries tried to take out of Haiti illegally after the January earthquake have parents, aid workers say, as they were finally reunited with their families.

"It has turned out that all of the 33 children have parents. SOS Children's Villages is convinced that in most cases, the best place for a child to be cared for and protected is within the family," a statement from the group said on Wednesday.

Laura Silsby and nine fellow Baptists from Idaho were arrested on January 29 as they tried to take the children into the neighbouring Dominican Republic by bus without the necessary documentation.

The group denied wrongdoing, saying it was only trying to help orphans in the wake of Haiti's devastating January 12 earthquake that killed more than 220,000 people.

Some parents told the judge they willingly handed over the children because they could no longer care for them following the quake that destroyed much of the Haitian capital.

Nine of the accused have since been released and returned to the United States, but Silsby, the leader of the New Life Children's Refuge group, remains in a Port-au-Prince jail facing charges of child trafficking.

SOS Children Villages spokeswoman Line Wolf Nielsen said that although it was in many cases a tearful reunion, or departure, many parents had actually been visiting for weeks.

"It wasn't as if you had parents and children running towards each other," she told AFP. "The children were dressed in their finest clothes and playing with the SOS 'mother' they had been living with."

"It was a happy event but a few tears were shared. Quite a few kids have made many friends here and they were sad to say goodbye."

The smallest of the children was only a few months old when the drama began seven weeks ago and she will have spent almost half her life in the care of a "mother" assigned to her by the US-based charity, founded in 1949 in Austria.

"We will continue to follow these children on home visits and make sure things are fine and well," said Wolf Nielsen.

The reunions followed weeks of painstaking registration work by Haitian government officials who had to be sure all the parents were bona fide.

The oldest of the 33 children at the centre of the high profile case, which diverted some of the media spotlight off the massive relief effort in Haiti, is just 12.