A Florida couple held captive for nearly a month in Haiti was freed Thursday after negotiations with their kidnappers, according to family members and the Haitian National Police, ABC News reports.
Family members say Jean-Dickens Toussaint and his wife, Abigail Toussaint, were kidnapped on March 18 in Port-au-Prince while on bus en route to visit an ailing relative and attend a festival.
“They stopped the bus at a stop and they asked for the Americans on the bus and their escorts to come off the bus and then they took them,” Christie Desormes, the couple’s niece, told ABC Affiliate WPLG last month.
Desormes said the family first learned about the ransom demands when the friend escorting the Toussaints contacted them. According to Desormes, the family paid the kidnappers’ $6,000 demand, but they later increased the ransom to $200,000 per individual.
Specifics of the couple’s release conditions have yet to be made public.
The U.S. State Department cautions Americans against traveling to Haiti “due to kidnapping, crime, and civil unrest.”
