Seven bombs explode, killing one, days before presidential election

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Seven bombs exploded around Haiti's capital Wednesday, killing a teen-age boy and injuring 14 people in an upsurge of violence before this weekend's presidential election.

Also Wednesday, Haiti's Senate voted to confirm Jacques-Edouard Alexis as premier, 20 months after President Rene Preval appointed him by decree. The lower house in considered almost certain to follow suit on Thursday.

Robinson Clairvil, 14, was killed on a busy downtown street when a bomb exploded next to him. Another bomb went off downtown, two exploded on the highway to the international airport and three exploded in the suburb of Petionville, police and radio reports said.

Shopkeepers in the capital, Port-Au-Prince, closed their stores in panic. Supporters of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, expected to win re-election in Sunday's vote, set up flaming tire barricades to protest the pre-vote violence.

Protesters carried Clairvil's blood-soaked body on a march past the National Palace to the local morgue.

The attacks were the latest in a series that have darkened the weeks preceding the Sunday election in which Aristide and six little-known opponents are running for the presidency.

Main opposition parties have boycotted the race, charging that local and legislative elections earlier this year were rigged by the government in favor of Aristide's Lavalas Family party, which won more than 80 percent of the seats. Aristide's Lavalas Family party and opposition spokesmen have accused each other of being responsible for the recent surge of violence.

On Nov. 10, unidentified suspects lobbed homemade gasoline bombs in front of four electoral council buildings in greater Port-au-Prince, causing little damage and no injuries.

On Nov. 2, self-proclaimed Lavalas Family partisans in Hinche, 45 miles outside the capital, opened fire on a meeting of the Papaye Peasants' Movement, the biggest rural workers' organization in Haiti. They wounded the brother of an outspoken Aristide critic.

Parliament is only now confirming a premier. Haiti has not had a premier since June 1997, when then-Premier Rosny Smarth resigned, protesting the tainted legislative elections won by candidates of Aristide's Lavalas Family party.

Faced with strong resistance from legislators, Preval appointed Alexis premier by decree in March 1999 with the mission to create conditions favorable for the holding of new elections. Parliament's action formalizes that decree.