More than two dozen gang members were killed by police and members of the public after residents of the country’s Pétion-Ville district awoke to panic and armed thugs in their midst on Tuesday.

The attempted attack on the tony residential suburb of Port-au-Prince, which has tried to keep out of the capital’s criminal gangs, sparked a response from residents unseen since April last year, when people in the Canape Vert neighborhood of Port-au – Prince hunted down and set fire to suspected gang members who were trying to invade their community.

At least 28 suspected gang members were killed, police spokesman Lionel Lazarre told the Miami Herald, as residents sheltered in place and all of Pétion-Ville remained on lockdown.

“At the moment, the police are continuing to carry out operations,” he said.

Lazarre said he does not yet know where the gang members, who have been threatening to invade the community for days, are from. Police and members of the Kenyan-led multinational security mission have been on high alert for several days now amid threats and constant gun battles around Port-au-Prince.

At least 10 gang members were killed by police and “righteous residents” after a truck carrying gang members crashed into a police checkpoint near the Oasis Hotel on Panamericana Avenue, he said. “There was an exchange of gunfire and the gang members fled,” Lazarre said.

Corpses, cut with machetes and set on fire, were scattered on the road. In the Bourdon Valley, not far from the residence of the US ambassador to Haiti and the prime minister’s office, several charred bodies littered the road.

Lazarre said the events began around 2 a.m. when police intercepted both the truck and a minibus heading up the hill toward the neighborhood. Both vehicles were carrying members of armed groups who, after days of fighting with police and members of the multinational police mission in the capital’s Solino and Nazon neighborhoods, had openly declared war and said Pétion-Ville and neighboring Delmas would be next.

In addition to the gang members in the truck, other armed gang members, he said, were killed after the minibus was stopped in the capital’s Post-Marchand district.

Hundreds of rounds of ammunition were seized from the gangs along with a drone and at least two AK47 assault rifles, Lazarre said, adding that police were continuing operations in the capital’s Bourdon area “where a lot of these guys are hiding. .”

The armed gangs’ attempt to attack Pétion-Ville, home to luxury hotels and some of the country’s wealthiest people, came amid heightened tensions in Haiti. Last week, the nine-member Transitional Presidential Council that runs Haiti ousted Prime Minister Garry Conille and installed a new head of government, entrepreneur Alix Didier Fils-Aime.

At the swearing-in ceremony, Fils-Aime said restoring security and holding elections were his top priorities. However, both are orders as armed gangs grow bolder and more neighborhoods fall under their control, despite the presence of the international armed police mission led by Kenya, with officers from the Bahamas, Jamaica and Belize.

Last week, after three US airliners were hit by gunfire while landing or leaving Port-au-Prince, the airport authority closed the capital’s international and domestic airports, and the Federal Aviation Administration issued a 30-day ban days on all US Flights to Haiti. The FAA’s decision also affected UN humanitarian flights, as well as a chartered helicopter that Taiwan funds for the Haitian National Police to transport police officers to hot spots.

The attacks have been accompanied by an increase in violence in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area, which in the past week has displaced another 20,000 people, including more than 10,000 children, the United Nations said. They join the more than 700,000 Haitians who have already been forced to flee their homes.

“Haiti’s children are once again bearing the brunt of unrelenting violence by armed groups that has changed their lives, casting a dark cloud over their future,” Geeta Narayan, country director of the UN child protection agency, UNICEF, said on Monday. “Children not only endure the trauma of violence in neighborhoods like Solino and Tabarre, but also face the compounding effects of malnutrition, cholera outbreaks, severe psychological distress and, all too often, tragic loss of life.”

On Wednesday, the UN Security Council will discuss the situation in Haiti in a meeting convened by Russia and China. The two countries, which have veto power in the council, remain opposed to a US push to turn the multinational security mission into a formal UN peacekeeping operation. Such a move would guarantee funding for the under-resourced effort and also expand the number of foreign police and military on the ground in Haiti to help fight the gangs.