Hun­dreds of peo­ple have fled their homes af­ter crim­i­nal gangs be­gan fight­ing with each oth­er over the last week­end, al­so forc­ing the clo­sure of hos­pi­tals in the cap­i­tal, Port-au-Prince.

The group, Doc­tors With­out Bor­ders (MSF), said hun­dreds of res­i­dents sought refuge in its hos­pi­tal in the neigh­bour­hood and that one of its se­cu­ri­ty guards had been shot by a stray bul­let while in­side the com­pound.

“We man­aged to evac­u­ate him, and his con­di­tion is now sta­ble,” said Davina Hayles, MSF’s head of mis­sion in Haiti. “But it is un­think­able that our teams and civil­ians should be­come vic­tims of these clash­es”.