The SUV drove in a convoy of police vehicles to a courthouse, even as dozens of Duvalier supporters blocked streets with overturned trash bins and rocks to try to prevent the former dictator from going to prison.

The courthouse was thronged with spectators and journalists trying to get in to view the proceedings. It was not immediately clear whether the session would be open to the public — or what, if any, charges had been filed against him.

His removal from the hotel came after he met in private with senior Haitian judicial officials met inside his hotel room amid calls by human rights groups and other for his arrest.

The country’s top prosecutor and a judge were among those meeting with the former leader in the high-end hotel where he has been ensconced since his surprise return to Haiti on Sunday.

Dozens of Haitian National Police officers were posted inside and around the hotel, some of them in riot gear or guarding the stairwells. A police vehicle for transporting prisoners was parked in front of the hotel’s main door and all non-police traffic was halted at the driveway.

Henry Robert Sterlin, a former ambassador under Duvalier who has said in recent days that he was speaking as a spokesman for the former dictator, told reporters at the scene he was shocked by the developments. “Let’s see if they put him in prison,” he said.

None of the officials present would comment on what was being discussed at the meeting. Asked by journalists why he was going to meet Duvalier, Judge Gabriel Amboisse said, “I’m here to assist the prosecutor because he asked me to be here with him.”

Duvalier was forced into exile in 1986 in a mass uprising and had been living in exile in France. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and others have urged the Haitian government to arrest him for widespread abuses.

Duvalier assumed power in 1971 at age 19 following the death of his father, Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier. The father and son presided over one of the darkest chapters in Haitian history, a period when thuggish government secret police force known as the Tonton Macoute tortured and killed opponents.

The younger Duvalier still has some support in Haiti and millions are too young to remember life under his dictatorship. His abrupt return sent shock waves through the country, with some fearing that his presence will bring back the extreme polarization, and political violence, of the past.

He has not yet publicly commented on why he came back to Haiti. His companion, Roy, told reporters he would stay three days.

His return comes as Haiti struggles to work through a dire political crisis following the problematic Nov. 28 first-round presidential election, as well as a cholera epidemic and a troubled recovery from an earthquake.

Duvalier has also been accused of pilfering millions of dollars from public funds and spiriting them out of the country to Swiss banks, though he denies stealing from Haiti.

The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights spokesman Rupert Colville said Tuesday that Duvalier’s return increases the chance that he could be charged with atrocities committed during his 15-year rule because it will be easier to bring charges in the country where the crimes occurred.

He cautioned, though, that Haiti’s fragile judicial system may be in no position to mount a case.

——–

Associated Press writer Frank Jordans in Geneva contributed to this report.

Associated Press journalists saw flames leaping from the roof of the Unity party headquarters, the center of Celestin’s campaign. Witnesses said the building in central Port-au-Prince was on fire for an hour.

Protesters said security guards shot demonstrators as they assaulted the building, but there were no confirmed injures in the fire or demonstration. Several fire trucks tried to control the blaze — an unusual scene in a city with few reliable public services.

Preval urged the candidates to call off the protests.

“This is not how the country is supposed to work,” he said in a live radio speech. “People are suffering because of all this damage.”

The president dismissed allegations that fraud invalidated the election results and faulted the U.S. Embassy for its criticism of the vote, saying it would be up to the country’s Provisional Electoral Council, known as the CEP, to review the results.

“If there are problems we can sit down and personally discuss it, but the American Embassy is not the CEP,” he said.

The official preliminary results have law professor and former first lady Mirlande Manigat in first with 31.4 percent of the vote and Celestin next with 22.5. Martelly has 21.8 percent — trailing Celestin by about 6,800 votes.

Hundreds of protesters massed near the offices of the electoral council in Petionville, with young men hurling rocks at U.N. peacekeepers in armored personnel carriers. The international troops and police occasionally responded with volleys of tear gas.

The area around the electoral office includes a plaza that is home to several thousand people in a tent encampment erected after the Jan. 12 earthquake so it was unclear whether all of the people on the street were protesters or if some were spectators. Also uncertain were the intentions of the demonstrators.

“If Michel Martelly is not president, in a day or two days things are going to get a lot worse,” said 22-year-old Lucate Hans, carrying a stick and the pink campaign poster of his candidate. “Tensions are going to rise and we are going to kill people.”

The results, announced after hours of delays Tuesday evening, were immediately questioned at home and abroad. The U.S. Embassy said the results did not match reports by official election observers who said Celestin would likely be eliminated in the first round.

An appeals period is open for the next three days, and election observers said a third candidate might be included in a Jan. 16 runoff if the electoral council decides the first-round vote was close enough — though the constitutionality of such a move would be debatable.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has expressed concern about allegations of fraud and the violence and he urged candidates to use only formal, legal procedures to make any challenges to the results, U.N. spokesman Martin Nesirky said.

“He reminds all candidates that they have a personal responsibility to encourage their supporters to remain calm and to stop violence. A peaceful solution to the current situation is crucial not only to confront the cholera epidemic in the short-term but also to create the conditions in the medium term for recovery and development from the earthquake,” Nesirky said at U.N. headquarters in New York.

But the protesters would not wait, and marched through the streets. About 2,000 pro-Martelly demonstrators also gathered near the U.S. Embassy but dispersed without incident.

“We want to tell them Martelly is the president. We won’t accept anything less. Otherwise we will set this country on fire,” Frances Odis said.

Martelly supporters also set up flaming barricades in Petionville, the smoke of burning tires blackening the air. Thousands were on the streets, singing political songs and chanting for “Micky.”

Vehicles were damaged by rocks and items were reportedly stolen from stores. Foreign aid workers complained that Haitian national police were slow to respond and that many officers refused to report to duty following the election results.

American Airlines halted flights in and out of the Haitian capital because airport employees were unable to get to work Wednesday because of demonstrations, spokeswoman Martha Pantin said.

In Les Cayes residents said government buildings had been attacked and set on fire.

Martelly had said before results were released that he believed he would win, and would not accept a spot in a runoff in which Celestin is present. He had not made a statement Wednesday, though some of his staffers had praised the protests on Twitter.

Thousands of voters were disenfranchised by confusion on the rolls during the Nov. 28 election and there were many reported incidents of ballot-stuffing, violence and intimidation confirmed by international observers.

Turnout was low according to the preliminary results, as just over 1 million people cast accepted ballots out of some 4.7 million registered voters. It is not known how many ballots were thrown out for fraud.

Officials acknowledged the rolls were both bloated and incomplete, with hundreds of thousands of earthquake dead still registered and many living voters waiting for ID cards. In the last days of counting, tabulators had to sort out clearly fraudulent tally sheets.

The U.N. secretary-general has said the problems were worse than originally reported. But the U.N. peacekeepers and the joint Organization of American States-Caribbean Community observer mission said the problems did not invalidate the vote.

The chief observer with the OAS-Caricom mission, Colin Granderson, appealed for patience.

“Remember that the results are only preliminary results,” Granderson told AP. “For all candidates who believe there were irregularities or fraud, there are recourses provided by the electoral law.”

Manigat, a 70-year-old law professor, is the wife of former Haitian president Leslie Manigat who served briefly in the late 1980s after a much-criticized election before being deposed by a coup. Her supporters include a powerful senator who organized violent protests in his home department ahead of the first round of voting.

Celestin, a virtual unknown before the election, is the candidate of Preval’s Unity party. He is the head of the state-run construction company whose trucks carted bodies and limited amounts of rubble out of the city after the Jan. 12 quake.

His campaign was the best-funded of the group but Preval’s inability to jump-start a moribund economy or push forward reconstruction after the massive earthquake drained his support. Many voters said they would accept “anyone but Celestin,” whom they equate with the unpopular Preval.

The clear winner in the bid for Senate seats was Preval’s party, which advanced to a run-off in eight of the 10 races in which it competed and won a ninth outright.

Independent candidate, Steven Benoit, a former member of Preval’s abandoned Lespwa movement who championed an increase in the minimum wage, won the 11th Senate seat for the area including Port-au-Prince.

——

Associated Press writers Jacob Kushner in Port-au-Prince and Ben Fox in San Juan, Puerto Rico, contributed to this report

The cholera outbreak that began last month has brought increased misery to the entire country, still struggling with the aftermath of last January’s earthquake. But anger has been particularly acute in the north, where the infection is newer, health care sparse and people have died at more than twice the rate of the region where the epidemic was first noticed.

The health ministry said Tuesday that the official death toll hit 1,034 as of Sunday. Figures are released following two days of review.

Aid workers say the official numbers may understate the epidemic. While the ministry of health says more than 16,700 people have been hospitalized nationwide, Doctors Without Borders reports that its clinics alone have treated at least 16,500.

On Tuesday, during a second day of rioting throughout northern Haiti, local reporters said a police station was burned in Cap-Haitien and rocks thrown at peacekeeping bases. A small protest was also reported in the northwestern city of Gonaives, but U.N. police said it ended peacefully.

In the town of Limbe, west of Cap-Haitien, the unrest carried through the night Monday as screams and chants filled the streets, said Beth Macy, a reporter for The Roanoke Times who accompanied a Virginia medical mission to Haiti. The group hunkered down in the hospital as protesters pelted the gate with stones, she said in a newspaper blog post.

The violence has combined some Haitians’ long-standing resentment of the 12,000-member U.N. military mission with the internationally shared suspicion that the U.N. base could have been a source of the infection.

Health experts have called for an independent investigation into whether Nepalese peacekeepers introduced the South Asian strain of cholera to Haiti, where no case of cholera had ever been documented before late October.

The U.N. denies responsibility, and a mission spokesman said the protests were politically motivated. Haiti’s national elections are scheduled for Nov. 28.

Cholera is transmitted by feces and can be all but prevented if people have access to safe drinking water and regularly wash their hands.

But sanitary conditions don’t exist in much of Haiti, and the disease has spread across the countryside and to nearly all the country’s major population centers, including the capital, Port-au-Prince. There are concerns it could eventually sicken hundreds of thousands of people.

Following Monday’s confirmation that a 3-year-old boy from a tent camp near Cite Soleil had contracted the disease before Oct. 31 without leaving the capital, the Pan-American Health Organization said the epidemic’s spread from river towns in the countryside to the nation’s primary urban center was a dangeorus development.

Damage to Port-au-Prince’s already miserable pre-earthquake sanitation and drinking water systems make the city “ripe for the rapid spread of cholera,” Dr. Jon K. Andrus, the organization’s deputy director, told reporters Tuesday.

Port-au-Prince is estimated to be home to between 2.5 million and 3 million people, about half of whom have been living in homeless encampments since the Jan. 12 earthquake ravaged the capital.

“We expect transmission to be extensive and we have to be prepared for it, there’s no question,” Andrus said. “We have to prepare for a large upsurge in numbers of cases and be prepared with supplies and human resources and everything that goes into a rapid response.”

A confirmed case of cholera had never been seen in this Caribbean country before last month, when it suddenly killed several dozen people and spread across the agricultural heartland of the Artibonite Valley. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that the strain is most similar to those found in South Asia, but no formal investigations have been done to learn how the disease arrived in Haiti.

It has killed more than 580 people and hospitalized more than 9,500, with confirmed cases across the entire northern two-thirds of the country. Dozens of cases are rumored throughout the south.

On Tuesday, Haiti’s health ministry said the disease has become a threat to the entire nation of 10 million people.

“Now it is our duty as citizens to help solve this problem, which has gone from being an urgent humanitarian matter and gone to the level of national security,” the ministry’s executive director, Dr. Gabriel Timothee, said during a televised news conference.

The disease, primarily spread when infected fecal matter contaminates food or water, is preventable and treatable, mainly by rehydrating the sick with safe water or intravenous fluids and sometimes using basic antibiotics.

But decades of failing and often regressing infrastructure — wracked by political upheaval, unbalanced foreign trade, a 1990s embargo and natural disasters — have left millions of Haitians without access to clean water, sanitation or medical care.

Haitian and foreign aid workers continued campaigns to tell people to wash their hands, cook food thoroughly and take other precautions against the spread of cholera. Treatment centers were being set up across the capital to handle the expected rising case load.

But health officials said that cholera will be part of the Haitian landscape for a long time, taking its place among the other challenges in one of the world’s most difficult places to live.

“We have to think about and plan for the long term,” Andrus said. “The bacteria have a foothold in the rivers and the water system, so it will be there for a number of years.”

“We got flooded out and we’re just waiting for the storm to pass. There’s nothing we can do,” said Johnny Joseph, a 20-year-old resident.

The storm, once again a hurricane with 85 mph (135 kph) winds, was battering the western tip of Haiti’s southern peninsula and the cities of Jeremie and Les Cayes.

One man drowned while trying to ford a river in an SUV in the rural area of Grand-Anse, said civil protection official Pierre Andre. The hurricane had earlier killed at least 14 people in the eastern Caribbean.

The center of the storm was 157 miles from Port-au-Prince, draping charcoal clouds over the city and dropping a steady rain with occasional bursts of wind. There were no immediate reports of damage.

The U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami predicted dangerous storm surges along the coast and possible flash floods and mudslides in mountainous areas.

Haiti’s civil protection department had urged people living in camps for the 1.3 million Haitians made homeless by the Jan. 12 earthquake to go to the homes of friends and family.

By evening it was clear most camp residents were not heeding the advice. People in the yard of a high school on the Delmas 33 thoroughfare in Port-au-Prince said their camp’s governing committee had passed along the official advice to leave, but they decided to stockpile water and tie down their tents instead.

Buses began circulating around the camps just after dark Thursday night to take residents away, but few were willing to go. Four civil protection buses that pulled up at a camp in the Canape-Vert district left with about five passengers on them.

Many camp residents stayed put out of fear they would lose their few possessions and, worse, be denied permission to return when the storm was over.

“I’m scared that if I leave they’ll tear this whole place down. I don’t have money to pay for a home somewhere else,” said Clarice Napoux, 21, who lives with her boyfriend on a soccer field behind the St. Therese church in Petionville. They lost their house to the quake and their only income is the little she makes selling uncooked rice, beans and dry goods.

Late Thursday, Tomas passed to the east of Jamiaca, where earlier schools closed in eastern provinces and traffic was jammed in the capital, Kingston, as businesses closed early.

“I’m taking no chances,” said Carlton Samms, a bus driver who went home early after stopping at a supermarket for food and other supplies.

The storm was expected to cross over Haiti’s southwestern tip, then swirl through the strait that divides Haiti from Cuba.

At the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay in southeastern Cuba, the military cleared away any debris that could fly off in strong winds, suspended flights, canceled school and closed the harbor to recreational craft.

“We have a well-rehearsed plan that is going to serve us well,” said Navy Cmdr. James Thornton, Guantanamo Bay’s operations officer.

Early Friday, the hurricane was located about 160 miles (255 kilometers) west of Port-au-Prince and 80 miles (130 kilometers) south-southeast of Guantanamo, Cuba. It was moving to the northeast at about 10 mph (16 kph). Tropical-storm-force winds extended as far as 140 miles (220 kilometers) from the center.

Forecasters warned of a dangerous storm surge that would generate “large and destructive waves” and raise water levels up to 3 feet (nearly 1 meter) above normal tide levels. It also predicted rainfall of 5 to 10 inches (12 to 25 centimeters) for much of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, which share the island of Hispaniola.

Port-au-Prince’s airport was expected to be closed through Friday, American Airlines spokeswoman Mary Sanderson said.

Most of Haiti’s post-quake homeless live under donated plastic tarps on open fields. It is often private land, where they have been constantly fighting eviction. A September report from U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said 29 percent of 1,268 camps studied had been closed forcibly, meaning the often violent relocation of tens of thousands of people.

Haitian human-rights lawyer Mario Joseph, who testified on behalf of those evicted before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights this summer, said he fears the government is using the storm as an excuse to drive people off disputed land.

“I think it’s going to be a time of eviction,” he said. He said he has advised people who know they are at risk for floods, landslides and wind damage to stay in buildings near the camp and return to their squatters’ sites as soon as possible after the storm.

Reconstruction has barely begun and even the building of transitional shelters — sturdier than makeshift tents, but not solid houses — has been slow. Large installments of long-term funds, including a promised $1.15 billion from the United States, have not arrived. The State Department now says it still has to prove the money won’t be stolen or misused.

“We know that, particularly with flooding and mudslides, there’s going to be a loss of life. It’s inevitable. But we will be prepared to do everything that we can to meet the immediate needs of the Haitian people,” State department spokesman P.J. Crowley said Thursday.

As rebuilding lags, the United Nations and aid groups have been giving people reasons to stay in camps, providing aid and essential services such as medicine. That continued Thursday as residents reluctant to leave were given reinforcing tarps and other materials.

“We have always said that the best way to protect people in camps is to make camps as resistant as possible to any weather,” said Imogen Wall, spokeswoman for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. “(Evacuation) doesn’t make sense … on a practical level, on a large scale.”

Residents of the nearly 8,000-person government relocation camp at Corail-Cesselesse threw bottles at aid workers trying to get them to leave their ShelterBox tents for schools, churches and an abandoned prison nearby.

“If we go away, other people are going to move in our place! We want to stay here because we don’t have another place to go,” said 29-year-old Roland Jean.

The camp’s grounds were designed by U.S. military engineers and graded by the United Nations. But the selection of the site has been criticized by aid groups almost since the beginning: The desert plain nine miles (15 kilometers) north of the city constantly floods and suffers wind damage.

Residents were told the tents could resist hurricanes. ShelterBox spokesman Tommy Tonkins said Thursday that they can stand up to heavy rains and 75 mph (120 kph) winds, but are not hurricane-proof.

Camp officials finally resolved the dispute and several hundred people left Thursday afternoon on trucks provided by U.N. peacekeepers. An AP reporter found that while the school, church and abandoned hospital chosen as shelters for them were large and undamaged, they had no water or usable toilets.

Tomas killed at least 14 people when it slammed the eastern Caribbean country of St. Lucia as a hurricane Saturday. It will cost roughly $500 million to repair flattened banana fields, destroyed houses, broken bridges and eroded beaches on the island, Prime Minister Stephenson King announced Thursday.

——

Associated Press television producer Chris Gillette and writers Jacob Kushner in Croix-des-Bouquets, Evens Sanon in Port-au-Prince, Howard Campbell in Kingston, Jamaica, and Guy Ellis in Castries, St. Lucia, contributed to this report.