November 17th, 2010
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Riots spread to several Haitian cities and towns yesterday, as protesters blaming peacekeepers from Nepal for a cholera epidemic exchanged gunfire with United Nations soldiers.
One demonstrator was shot dead by a UN peacekeeper during an exchange of gunfire in Quartier Morin, the UN mission said.
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No one has yet been able to establish where the cholera epidemic started or who started it but the locals are blaming the Nepalese UN troops who moved into a base beside the Artibonite river in early October.
There had been no cholera in Haiti previous to this and the strain of the disease appears to be from south Asia. The base that the soldiers are in has sanitation problems and a week later the river was contaminated and people in the area started vomiting and getting diarrhoea. This information was enough for the local population as officials said more than 1,034 people had now died in the outbreak.
The multinational UN peacekeeping force has been trying to keep order in Haiti since 2004.
A UN statement blamed the violence on political agitators and said troops fired in self-defence.
