Looting goes on in Haiti

The nation's political rivals meanwhile were assessing their meeting earlier in the day, the first in the month-old crisis to start the process of naming a new government.

An official of the huge Haiti Terminal, which handles 35 percent of the country's container imports, called the looting a "disaster."

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"We have to act quickly to save what's left of the containers before the catastrophe is total," the official, Georges Romain, said.

The port's warehouses, holding an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 containers, were the main target as of late Thursday.

"The area must be quickly secured by a military force of Americans, French or Haitian National Police," Romain told AFP.

During the day Thursday, residents of the capital converged on banks which were open for the first time in two weeks.

Sporadic gunfire still echoed in parts of Port-au-Prince, but the city was relatively calm after days of chaos marked by killing, arson and looting sprees that left a shoulder-high pile of decomposing bodies stacked in the main morgue.

An exact death toll from the violence that erupted was impossible to determine on Thursday.

The Pentagon said it expected Haitian police to handle looting and disorder in Port-au-Prince and the 1,000 US Marines in the capital to play a supporting role.

"We are going to support the Haitian police, who are handling that very well right now," said Brigadier General David Rodriguez, of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The advance wave of a UN-backed stabilization security force hastily established itself as violence erupted amid anarchy in the capital after president Jean Bertrand Aristide resigned and fled last weekend.

Aristide accused France of colluding with the United States to oust him in a coup d'etat and complained from the Central African Republic where he is in exile that he had been the victim of a "political kidnapping" and was forced out at gunpoint.

Washington dismissed the charges and rejected calls for an inquiry into the conditions of Aristide's departure.