Armed men attempted to hijack a UN food convoy at a road near Haiti’s Jeremie airport, the UN said on Tuesday, assessing that the situation in the quake-hit country is “stable but potentially volatile”.

“An incident was reported at the Jeremie airport of an armed group attacking a food convoy; warning shots were fired,” said the UN Bureau for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) in a report on the situation in Haiti.

“The overall security situation across the country remains stable but potentially volatile,” it said.

Elisabeth Byrs, spokeswoman of OCHA in Geneva, told AFP that the armed group had made a road blockade, but the UN mission had “fired a few warning shots, sending them fleeing” in the incident on Saturday.

Meanwhile, in the city of Jacmel, to the south of the capital Port-au-Prince, 33 prisoners who had escaped from a prison during the earthquake which struck on January 12, were caught on Sunday, added OCHA.

Some 6,000 detainees have fled Haitian prisons as they were partially destroyed and left without surveillance since the devastating earthquake on January 12 which left 170,000 people dead.

The security situation is one of the main concerns of international relief teams and residents of the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, which had been hit by looting following the disaster.

Aid convoys are usually escorted and distributions monitored by UN mission escorts, which are in some occasions also assisted by the United States, which had deployed 22,000 soldiers to Haiti.

Meanwhile, the UN’s top humanitarian affairs official on Tuesday defended the US response to the earthquake in Haiti, saying that US troops are not planning to occupy the country as critics have claimed.

“There is not really an issue there about their presence, they’re not trying to dominate the country militarily, they don’t have any agenda other than simply the aid operation,” said John Holmes.

“We’re very glad that they’re there. They’ve been able to do things that we couldn’t have done ourselves like run the airport, like help with repairing the port, like providing heavy airlift for some of the items we couldn’t move around ourselves in the first couple of weeks,” he added.

Holmes noted that while US troops were helping the UN mission to maintain security during food distributions, the “primary responsibility for security is with the UN peacekeeping forces.”

“It’s been that from the beginning and no one is contesting that,” he added.

© 2010 AFP