A court in Haiti on Monday freed a U.S. missionary jailed for weeks on charges of kidnapping children in the chaos that followed the country's devastating January 12 earthquake, witnesses said, Reuters reported.
Charisa Coulter was due to fly out of Haiti to the United States. Haitian authorities arrested 10 missionaries in January but eight were released in February and only the group's leader, Laura Silsby, remains in jail.
The case threw a spotlight on fears that child traffickers could prey on vulnerable children in the wake of the quake and also on the merits of rapid international adoptions for earthquake orphans, a practice the government later banned.
Silsby and Coulter and eight other Americans, most of whom are members of a Baptist church in Idaho, were arrested on January 29 on charges that they tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the earthquake-shattered country without proper documents.
All have protested their innocence and a judge found no evidence of criminal intent by those who were released.
A Haitian judge on Friday signed an order to free Coulter, but delayed her release because court officials could not find a stamp used to validate the release document.
Silsby remains in jail as an investigating judge looks into a new charge that she was trying to organize travel from Haiti for others without proper papers, a lesser crime under Haitian law.