Former Haitian Prime Minister Yvon Neptune and another inmate linked to ousted ex-President Jean-Bertrand Aristide were back in prison on Saturday after briefly leaving amid conflicting accounts of an armed attack on the jail, witnesses and officials said.

Police said Neptune and former Interior Minister Jocelerme Privert were returned to the National Penitentiary in Port-au-Prince where UN troops, trying to keep the peace in the unstable Caribbean country, said they would now provide security. Police, UN peacekeepers and witnesses offered different accounts of the incident involving Neptune, accused by the government of a massacre during a revolt last year against Aristide.

Police spokeswoman Jessie Coicou said Neptune and Privert escaped along with other inmates when gunmen attacked the prison and sent poorly armed prison guards fleeing. One off-duty prison guard was killed. A police source speaking on condition of anonymity said up to 500 of the prison?s 1,200 inmates may have escaped. ?I don?t have any evidence that they (Neptune and Privert) were being held hostage by anybody,? Coicou said.

But several eyewitnesses said Neptune and Privert appeared to have been taken out at gunpoint. ?I saw three gunmen escorting Neptune and several other prisoners ...,? said Jacques Dameus, who said he was in front of the prison at the time. ?When they arrived at the gate of the National Penitentiary, Neptune did not want to walk any further. One gunman raised his weapon and forced him to walk.?

Three men later reported to police that gunmen escorting a man they recognized as Neptune had forced them to hand over their car and had driven him away in it. ?I saw Neptune with my own eyes,? said Ketel Jacob, who was in the car. He seemed to be taken by force.A spokesman for the peacekeeping mission, Damian Onses-Cardona, said UN troops were called to a private house in Port-au-Prince in the evening where they found Neptune and Privert unguarded and unharmed.

They were returned to their cells and Onses-Cardona said UN police would now maintain security inside the troubled penitentiary, which has been wracked by riots, while UN troops would take up guard positions outside. Bullet casings littered the ground outside the prison, clothes discarded by fleeing inmates cluttered the pavement and bullet holes pockmarked the walls of nearby houses. In addition to Neptune and Privert, who had been jailed for several months without being indicted, witnesses said the gunmen took away a former soldier named Anel Belzaire.

Almost a year after Aristide fled the armed revolt ? his stature as the father of Haitian democracy and champion of the country?s poor sullied by charges of despotism and corruption ? Haiti remains torn by political violence. The government is pitted against street gangs still loyal to Aristide, and its once warm relations with former soldiers who helped lead the revolt against Aristide have chilled under their repeated demands for the re-establishment of the army.

Joseph GUYLER DELVA