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[haitiwebs]

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti (AP) -- Fifteen police officers will be prosecuted in an attack that killed at least six civilians during a soccer match in Haiti's capital, the national police chief said.

The officers were detained following a nearly two-month investigation into the August 20 attack in Martissant, a poor neighborhood of tin-roof shacks in southwestern Port-au-Prince, police chief Mario Andresol told reporters Monday.

State prosecutors will decide what charges the officers will face, Andresol said. However, many criminal suspects wait months or years before being charged because of delays within Haiti's corrupt and inefficient justice system.

Witnesses claimed police were seeking gang members aligned with ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide when they stormed a soccer stadium during a match and ordered the crowd of 5,000 to lie on the ground. Other police and civilians surrounded the stadium, shooting or hacking people with machetes as they tried to flee, the witnesses said.

Andresol said an investigation found that six civilians were killed, although others have put the death toll at 10. Andresol said it was possible other bodies never reached the morgue and therefore weren't counted.

Nearly three dozen police officers were investigated in the attack, said Andersol, who took command in July with the mammoth task of cleaning up Haiti's ill-equipped, corruption-riddled force of 6,000 officers.

"There is a large corruption problem," said Andresol, who just returned from touring the country's police units. "About a quarter of the force is involved in corruption, kidnappings or even arms trafficking."

Pierre Esperance, a local human rights activist, praised the move to prosecute the 15 officers as a turning point for Haiti's police force, which rarely investigates officers for rights abuses.

Human rights groups have long accused the police force of killing Aristide supporters under the pretext of restoring order to the violent capital.

"I believe this is the first time the police have so thoroughly investigated its own abuses," Esperance said.