Haiti issued wildly conflicting death tolls for the January 12 earthquake, adding to confusion about how many people actually died – and to suspicion that nobody really knows.

Desperate parents in a struggling village perched above Haiti’s earthquake-flattened capital said they gave their children willingly to a group of US missionaries to take them to a better life.

THE confirmed death toll from Haiti’s devastating earthquake has topped 150,000 in the Port-au-Prince metropolitan area alone, the communications minister said yesterday, with many more thousands dead around the country or still buried under the rubble.